December 11th, 2007

The most disappointing products of 2007

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 9:09 am

Categories: Thoughts

Tags: Product, Apple Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Apple iTunes, Hauppauge, AppleTV, Digital Music, Video Cards, Hd Dvd, Microsoft Windows

Yesterday I put up the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone up as the biggest hits of 2007.  Today while glancing through my inbox I come across this request:

“So, you like the Wii, but what, in your opinion, were the products that sucked the most for 2007?”

OK, you asked for it!  But rather than look at what sucked (which is rather subjective) I’m going to concentrate of products that have disappointed me over 2007.  So, here is the Hardware 2.0 list of the most disappointing products of 2007 - the products that weren’t released; they escaped!

There are a lot of products to choose from and the challenge here is to work the mental sieve vigorously and catch what falls out of the bottom. 

Here in no particular order, are products that could have made it to the top of the disappointing list:

AMD desktop processors

I’m not sure what’s wrong with AMD these days.  The company seems to be spending too much time pushing wild ideas (which usually come with an insane price tag and even insaner power requirements) like the Quad FX platform and engaging in a public slanging match with Intel and too little time working on new, innovative products. 

For the entirety of 2007 I’ve held the belief that AMD would come out with something worth buying, but that hope is now gone.  I’m not sure what’s going on at AMD but progress seems to have slowed down drastically and I’m wondering whether my last Athlon 64 X2 processor will have eroded to dust before I buy another AMD branded processor.

As a past AMD fan, it’s sad that they make it onto this list because as AMD becomes weaker, there’s a real danger that Intel will stagnate, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone.

nVIDIA graphics card drivers

I’m a pretty big fan of nVIDIA graphics cards, but getting them to work reliably, especially when pushing them hard or when gaming, is getting to be too much like hard work.  I’m not going to pretend for one moment that ATi’s stuff is all perfect, because they’re not, but they’re far more reliable than any nVIDIA has.

Hopefully things will change next year.

Hauppauge drivers

Hauppauge is another company that has good products let down by poor drivers, especially under Vista.  Again, I’m in a position of being a long-time fan and have several Hauppauge products in numerous systems, but driver issues are making me want to melt down the cards into scrap. 

The problem with Hauppauge hardware seems to be that if Windows (in particular Windows Vista) gets wind of the hardware before you install the drivers, it’s game over and the driver installation will fail every time with a cryptic message.  You then have to go through the laborious process of shutting down the system, removing the card, restart the system, removing every last 1 and 0 relating to the card using a cleaner tool that Hauppauge provide (which is sorely lacking in any real feedback of documentation), shut down, reinstall the card, restart again, hopefully catch Windows in the act of installing the hardware and stop it and then run the Hauppauge drivers.  Hopefully, if you’ve done everything right and the moon and the planets are all in the right position, things will go well.  If not, it’s back round the loop once again.

Blu-ray and HD DVD

Unless you like the idea of stepping into a war between two rival tech factions, I suggest staying out of the Blu-ray/HD DVD mess until the smoke clears a bit.  At present the main “advantage” of both technologies is that they further erode out concepts of fair use.

Sure, if you buy a PS3 or an Xbox 360, you’re forced to take sides, but the idea of spending the kind of cash I do on DVDs on HD DVD of Blu-ray discs while this standards war is going on just doesn’t make sense. 

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