2007 seemed to be a year of minor improvements in the PC world along with a few ideas that were set to revolutionize the world. Of course, more than not a few of these ideas didn't catch on with the industry or with the computing public. With that said, let's take a look at some of the items from 2007 that I feel deserve the title of PC Blunders of 2007.
This isn't really so much a failure as a false start that happens to a lot of new technology. DDR3 is set to offer performance gains to computer memory that DDR2 supposedly can't offer. The problem is that the adoption of DDR3 has been slow and as a result the costs for the memory are extremely high. In fact, most of the early releases were only for performance memory. DDR2 memory modules are available that offer similar performance for as much as half of what the DDR3 costs. Similarly things happened when DDR2 and DDR were orginally introduced. Over time, DDR3 production and performance will improve such that the prices will fall and more people use it.
With Intel's success in the processor and chipset market, it's kind of surprising that they ended up releasing a product like the X38 desktop chipset. After the hit of the P35 chipset for the mainstream market, expectations were high that the next performance desktop chipset successor of the 975X chipset would add a large amount of features. The end product frankly didn't add much more than what consumers could already get with the P35 at a much, much lower overall cost. About the only real feature added to the X38 was a software based system that allowed for on the fly adjustments to the various processor and memory settings for those looking at adjusting their systems performance. This doesn't really justify the overall cost though.
The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT was going to be the graphics card to put them back on top of NVIDIA in terms of performance. The hype was real and so was the eventual and extremely delayed product. The end result was a card that cost more, was much bigger, used more power and generated more heat than the competition. All of these factors lead to the market essentially ignoring ATI as a high performance 3D graphics competitor to NVIDIA for pretty much all of 2007. At least they have redeemed themselves with the new Radeon HD 3000 series, but they still don't have a part to compete on the high end of the graphics market.
Hybrid hard drives were set to change mobile computing by providing the large capacity of a traditional hard drive with the power savings and performance boost of solid state drives. Of course, these drives wouldn't really see these benefits without a compatible operating system in the form of Windows Vista with its SuperFetch, ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost features. This would allow the system to take commonly used files and put them in the faster flash than from the traditional drive. The end result was a drive that was more expensive than a traditional drive but really didn't have all that much of a performance boost. It did save some battery life, but most solid state drives look to be the more popular and expensive alternative.
Tecnically the AMD Quad FX platform was launched at the end of 2006, but 2007 was when products really became available. The design combined two new AMD Athlon 64 FX dual core processors on a single board to provide four cores to provide extreme performance. While it did boost performance for a limited number of applications, the general consumer was left looking at the cost. The chips weren't compatible with the rest of the AMD processor lineup and were extremely expensive. This resulted in a platform that was ridiculously expensive yet didn't give much of a performance boost for the average consumers uses. Needless to say it didn't take off and AMD officially dropped the product line at the end of 2007.
