Today I thought I'd update my iPhone to 1.1.3 firmware. Here's the hell I encountered.

1. Run iTunes, try to update firmware and am told I need to update iTunes.
2. Update iTunes. Wait 15 minutes for downloads, accept the Klingon license agreement. Ignore the demand to reboot.
3. iTunes works, but decides to "update my library" which for some reason involves uploading many megabytes of data to something on the Internet.
4. Try to update iPhone. Get "error 1602".
5. Research online, get no conclusive results. Try rebooting to see if it fixes it.
6. Start iTunes after reboot. Get error "iTunes cannot run because it has detected a problem with your audio configuration".
7. Research online, uninstall Quicktime and iTunes entirely and reinstall.
8. Wait 20 minutes for downloads and installs. Miraculously, no reboot required! Also no way to prevent Quicktime from stealing the .mov file association.
9. iTunes works! iPhone update starts! Hooray!
10. 5 minutes later, iPhone update continues. Realize the progress bar has no measured finish time; just a little blue light scanning endlessly.
11. Update finally finishes, iPhone reboots, iTunes recognizes it again.
12. Unplug phone in a hurry because I'm 10 minutes late. Phone seems to work.
13. Phone crashes when I'm in my car. Reboot the phone and find it's no longer activated with the cell provider and is now useless.

I spent 90 minutes downloading updates, rebooting, reinstalling. And in the end what did I get? A broken iPhone. Wasn't Apple the computer for the rest of us?

(Yes, the phone is working again; plugging it into iTunes and waiting a few minutes seems to have now fixed it.)