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I think an often overlooked disappointment is the DVD format. They increasingly are making them more and more annoying. It seems standard practice now to disable the back, forward, and menu buttons during the FBI warnings, and in many cases, that lame "downloading is illegal" ad. I've even seen many DVDs that don't let you skip the movie trailers they tack on the beginning of the DVD (or that require you to use Fast Forward instead of Track Forward to skip them). It's becoming ridiculous. When I stick the movie in, the movie should start playing immediately. If I want to change something, I should be able to hit the menu button to get to the menu, but it shouldn't be the default. And the FBI/anti-piracy stuff should be printed on the packaging, not on the DVD itself (same goes for the "The commentary track does not represent the opinion of Fox, or any other company, so don't sue us, please" crap). I'm about to the point that I'm going to quit buying DVDs and just pirate them, for nothing else but to eliminate the hassle. Remember when DVDs were promoted because they were easier to use than VHS? Yeah, not any more.

I guess that could be lumped in with the DRM, but I don't have experience with DRM'ed stuff because I refuse to buy anything with DRM of any kind. It's about time that we, as consumers, quit putting up with this kind of nonsense.

I whole heartedly agree. Vista has to be in the top ten disappointments of '06. (Although its not released yet, RC's were awful). The "rolodex alt-tab" thing? So similar to what OS X has had for over a year now. Dock-able apps? Again OS X and Fluxbox. Transparent windows? How about again, OS X or any Linux window manager.

I will secede that DX10 is/will be awesome. Its BS that microsoft will only ship it with Vista. I'll bet that the performance benefits of DX10 will come crashing down with all that "fluf" that microsoft has running in the background. If I wanted a flashy desktop I wouldn't spend hours running through setup menus and registry keys turning all that crap off.

Why is Vista bad because it is taking ideas from other OSes? Do you mean that those features on on OSX, so they must be bad because OSX sucks? Or do you mean that if because they didn't do it first then it must be crap? Your comment makes no sense. Also you can't really be disappointed in a product that is not released yet, we haven't even seen the final version yet.

Took me a while to decide.
802.11n - my vote. A way for router companies to gouge $$ from home users that have typicaly less than 10mbps internet speeds. Not even finalized & their marketing it.
Broadband - dsl available a lot more this year here in Chicago area than last year & at 14.99 for 12 months.
Sony - I didn't buy anything of theirs.
Zune - Not going to buy it, could care less.
DRM - same issues as before for me, only 20 songs & their on a cd.
Viiv - lotsa hype, little benefit, I don't notice it.
UMPC - don't even know what it is.
HDTV - have a 26" tube & I use OTA. Could have stronger signals but otherwise no changes for me.
Apple iPod - no changes for me.
Microsoft IE7 - I use it & "it's an internet browser". I could've cared less about the hype.

Not on the list but gets my vote:
LG Chocolate - looks cool, but only1GB max for mp3's.

I voted for IE7 as my biggest disappointment. Advertized great change, can't really tell any difference. Waste of time in my viewpoint.

My real disappointment was in AMD's 4x4/QFX. Like many, I hoped for something really good, though I was uneasy about it. When the results came out, I wondered, "Why bother?" Worse, it makes me wonder even more if the promise of K8L will be more of the same pit of dispair.

quick note again. One of the few requirements for this category were that it had to be a technology which impacted 2006 (that is why Sony's rootkit wasn't mentioned, by the way) and it had to be available in 2006.

For Vista, it will not be available until Jan 2007, this disqualifies the software right away. QuadFX may have been disappointing to some, but it really depends on your viewpoint. I believe it is a brilliant idea and was the right move for AMD at the time. However, I do not think that the technology is substantial enough to have made an impact on 2006.

If there was a disappointment on AMD's side, it was that the company may have underestimated how strong Core would be. But, in my view, all other techs mentioned in the article outweigh any AMD product. Again, it is a very subjective ranking, but it is interesting you guys are bringing this topic up. Makes me think ...

While it doesn't fit in the same category of disappointing technical-related items, I absolutely agree about DVD programming. Hey, if I'm paying money for it, do not show me ads, for anything. When I push a button on the hardware, I expect the hardware to go faster, or whatever is needed to skip through what I don't want to see. It may take software to know when the next track has been reached, but software on a DVD player should never be permitted to disable a hardware function. Anyone care to review DVD players that don't do this? They'd sell an awful lot of units...

That is really annoying. If I am paying money, I should be able to fast forward the crap that I don't want to see. This just encourages movie piracy.

I whole heartedly agree. Vista has to be in the top ten disappointments of '06. (Although its not released yet, RC's were awful). The "rolodex alt-tab" thing? So similar to what OS X has had for over a year now. Dock-able apps? Again OS X and Fluxbox. Transparent windows? How about again, OS X or any Linux window manager.

I will secede that DX10 is/will be awesome. Its BS that microsoft will only ship it with Vista. I'll bet that the performance benefits of DX10 will come crashing down with all that "fluf" that microsoft has running in the background. If I wanted a flashy desktop I wouldn't spend hours running through setup menus and registry keys turning all that crap off.
To be fair, Apple copied their GUI from others. There are no new idea's. Just the ones you haven't marketed yet.

My main complaint regarding the interface stealing going on in Vista is that they did it in the laggiest and most resource intensive way possible. I couldn't care less that it was a stolen concept.

Sony is my #1 disappointment, but I agree Broadband is a mixed bag. I think the 15$ a month I spend for ADSL from AT&T is not a bad price for 750K download. However I would also agree with the article that infrastructure upgrades have come to a crawl in other-then-metropolitan parts of the country.

hmmmm......excellent top ten, but you seemed to have missed one important item that we all should agree deserves to be in the top ten.

The AGEIA PHYSX card.

Overpriced, slows games down more than speeds them up, PCI, poor drivers! if the others have been the top 10 disappointments of the year then the AGEIA PhysX card has to be the joke of the year.

Anyone agree/disgree?

you had to expect good things from it first for it to be a dissappointment

Hmm this guy thinks he knows when to chime in on talking about a console. Sony makes a bad console and bad games? and Nintendo makes great games, with cartnooy graphics. yeah i do hear about game cube games being made or successful, and considering the wii has the same graphics as the game cube as soon as the hype wears off the wii will die just as quickly as the game cube. While meantime the PS3 and 360 will rule the arena. I'm tired of reading posts about how great Nintendo is, people seem to have forgotten what nintendo produced last round and what it looks like its doing this round;.

Ah. So true.

Its true that it is a disappointment, but as Stranger said, you have to expect big things to be disappointed. Its recognized that the CPU can handle physics tasks without being bogged down. Putting a separate processor and using the PCI bus to handle communications is just asking for trouble. Especially with the fast paced games out today.

True enough. It was a doomed idea from the start. Then nVidia released CUDA which was sort of the final nail in their coffin. That + 4-core CPUs.

I like my gamecube. Then again I have never been one of the people who obsesses about great graphics. As long as I can easily tell what is going on, I'm a happy camper. For me it is all about gameplay, story, and fun. Havn't seen too much of that on the 360 or PS3 yet. We will see I suppose.

Main thing in the wii's favor is that it is agressively marketing toward new audiences and pricing reasonably.