RIP Anandtech

[grommit!]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell

After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

I stopped visiting the place a long time ago, but it's still worth noting the passing of an outlet that did some really great in depth reporting. At least Ian Cutress is still out there for those who prefer the written word.

(edit) for a real hit of nostalgia, the web archive has a copy of the original anand's tech page

 

[Ardax]

Holy shit. The end of an era for sure.

 

[fitten]

Wow... similar, here. At one time, Anandtech was in my morning lineup/rotation. I stopped going as much some years back. Sad to see it go

 

[GaitherBill]

Woah.

Not that I’ve read anything of theirs in 20 years.

 

[sword_9mm]

Remember this one from the way back. Yeah haven't read in years but let's pour one out.

 

[CPX]

Dang. Wasn't in my regular reading the way Ars is, but it was one of the places I frequented.

F

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

I remember being annoyed with them for inaccurate information, but I don't remember what it was anymore. I've stopped by once or twice the last couple months, but didn't see anything that was very interesting.

Tom's has had some good stuff lately. I was just reading up on 3D printers there a couple weeks ago, and their reviews seemed quite solid. But Anandtech was just.... kinda blah.

Still, they've been at it a very long time, and I hope everyone lands on their feet.

 

[tucu]

Ian Cutress posted a long video on this:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY

 

[DaveB]

All my early socket 7 and slot 1 system builds in the late 1990s were based on then teenager Anand Lal Shimpi's reviews. When he left, the air went out of that site for me.

 

[fitten]

I remember being annoyed with them for inaccurate information, but I don't remember what it was anymore. I've stopped by once or twice the last couple months, but didn't see anything that was very interesting.

Tom's has had some good stuff lately. I was just reading up on 3D printers there a couple weeks ago, and their reviews seemed quite solid. But Anandtech was just.... kinda blah.

Still, they've been at it a very long time, and I hope everyone lands on their feet.

I remember when Tom's was frequently inaccurate as well back when they were just starting out. They got a lot better after a while but I haven't read them in a good while either. I'm not sure where they stand, now.

 

[Peldor]

I started reading that so long ago my bookmark for it says Anand's Hardware Page from before they were AnandTech. One of the best original review sites.

 

[Jim Salter]

They will be deeply missed. I didn't read Anandtech regularly just because something was there, but Anandtech was the site to go to for intensely detailed, extremely technical reviews that assumed you knew as much about technology as the reviewer, you simply weren't the one who had spent 20+ hours with the thing under review yourself.

That's a niche that even Ars has never really occupied. At our best, we come close--but Ars tries to at least be more accessible to people well below a given article author's area of expertise. If the world can only have one or the other, I'd give up Anandtech for Ars any day, because I think the value in Ars' gentler, more educational approach uplifts one HELL of a lot of people who bounce off extremely dry stuff like you'd generally find at Anandtech... but that doesn't change the fact that in a lot of cases, if you ARE one of those folks with extremely deep tech knowledge of your own, and you REALLY needed to dive deep down into the weeds on a piece of gear, there was no better place to go than Anandtech.

BRB, I need to go pour out a Monster energy drink or something. :'(

 

[rodalpho]

Agree, Anandtech was the definitive spot for well founded analysis on consumer PC hardware. It was the GN or DF of its time. They’ll be missed.

 

[Jim Salter]

Honestly, we really should have brief coverage of AnandTech's closing here. It's important tech news in its own right.

 

[ikjadoon]

What a loss for the community of technology and journalism. I remember looking at my first AnandTech articles and thinking, "This is way beyond my reading comprehension level, but, man, if it is not wildly interesting."

// my comment on the site itself

Thank you to everyone who made AnandTech what it is, a sincere and thoughtful publication that educated, revealed, and analyzed tech: Ryan, Ian, Andrei, Gavin, Ganesh, Brett, Donovan, Joshua, Billy Tallis, and of course Anand.

So much of my own thinking, writing, and analysis has drawn from the prolific AnandTech archives, challenging my processes and more often than not, pointing me in the right direction.

Not only for technology, though, but simply put, journalism as a whole across any field. Trust us when we say in many other fields, people would give the world over to have a free publication like AnandTech educating millions. It is simply unheard of.

Thank you all for the lifelong mark you've made on the world at large. I hope to see AT's core mission as a bulwark against principle-less, rigor-less, and often useless "reporting" truly revitalized, if not literally but spiritually.

That is what we owe the current and next generation of readers.

// what could have been

I wish AnandTech had been able to migrate to a Patreon or perhaps a free-paid membership model a la Ars (e.g., more articles, BTS, no ads, more engagement, etc.).

FWIW, I emailed Ryan Smith in 2021 about starting a subscription option for AnandTech, where many including me would happily donate or subscribe monthly. Ryan's reply, which I imagine is safe to share now:

One of my long-term goals is to offer a subscription option for AnandTech. For various technical reasons, this isn’t readily possible on our current CMS. Our publisher’s CMS, on the other hand, does have this kind of functionality; so once we get transitioned to that, we’ll be in a much better position to look at adding subscriptions. I can’t make any promises (this is up to Future), but it at least would provide the tech underpinnings necessary.

I emphasize: "this is up to Future".

I always wondered, "Why doesn't Future just sell or write of AnandTech if it's not doing well? Why keep something that you are unable to profit from?" I now believe Future refused to budge more out of anti-competitive reasons (e.g., so that other publishers couldn't buy AnandTech and perhaps do a much better job).

And then Future starved AT of competent stewardship, which is all AT needed: it was a well-managed site before the purchase. It would've naturally adapted, I think, to subscriptions, video, podcasts, etc. The latter two offer obvious advertising angles that could be non-hardware related (e.g., Squarespace & Gamers Nexus).

 

[Andrewcw]

I never went to look up the current owners until today. And they're the same group who own Tom's. Not that i have visited either in the recent years. I hope it is just consolidation and Tom's lives a bit longer as the only thing i found useful is the video card hierarchy lists where you get a general feel around where a video card of an older era fits. Like is it worth installing over a more recent onboard video solution.

Also hopefully they will be able to Mothball the site and be able to maintain it online for history for as long as possible.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The end of a site that has a lot of history, but AnandTech hasn't been much more than generic tech coverage for at least a decade, probably more but I can't remember exactly when I stopped going regularly. A while after Anand sold it off it just became another site in the owner's catalog (and I don't know who has owned it over the years, if it changed hands again), expected to follow the same rules and requirements and meet the same expectations that all their other sites did, aimed to cover as wide a demographic as possible, eventually with the cheapest freelancer articles possible that could have appeared on any other site. Before that, it was PC hardware enthusiast-run, targeted at enthusiasts, with dedicated writers and editors looking to provide something that wasn't available elsewhere and doing it because they believed in it. It's been at least ten years since I went there for anything other than "I'm bored and just looking for some tech to read about", and since it was much more than yet another review of yet another power supply or mobile phone or USB flash drive with coverage that wasn't really anything I couldn't get elsewhere but sometimes had a particular product I hadn't seen anywhere else.

The AT forums were also at one time where I spent an inordinate amount of my free time. Then life happened and I got pulled away and the site changed and the type of user on it changed and I never went back.

Add it to the list of amazing sites that sold out and declined, along with The Tech Report.

Ars Technica of course is also just another site in the owner's catalog, but has managed to stay relevant and useful and isn't just a review site, and hasn't needed to adhere to the generic requirements of the conglomerate or end up looking and behaving like everyone else.

 

[steelghost]

I have strong memories of reading a review of a CD-ROM drive on Anand's Hardware Page, on one of the ancient lab computers back when I was an undergraduate. So many other industry milestones, the first place to go was there - Conroe, Apple Silicon, multiple generations of GPUs, the list goes on. So for sure, it's a sad day to see it enter archive mode, hopefully it will at least be spared the ignominious fate that TR suffered.

I don't think it's fair to say that sites "sell out" - people's life circumstances change, they move on. So many sites (or these days, YT channels) were or still are, in some cases, passion projects that are a product of that person's personality and ambitions. When they move on, inevitably things change, and usually it means the thing that first attracted people to that site changes as well.

Would GN still be GN without Steve? What about L1T and Wendell, Steve at HWUB, etc etc. Sure there are sites that have somehow transcended that barrier, Ars is the main example but it sure as hell isn't the same Ars many of us were reading in 2002 or whenever.

 

[Ardax]

Sure there are sites that have somehow transcended that barrier, Ars is the main example but it sure as hell isn't the same Ars many of us were reading in 2002 or whenever.

It's not the same content, but it's still Ken at the helm driving the culture for the site, its staff, and its community.

 

[teleos]

(edit) for a real hit of nostalgia, the web archive has a copy of the original anand's tech page

I remember Abit well

 

[Lord Evermore]

I don't think it's fair to say that sites "sell out"

I don't mean just moving on and selling the site, which could be done by passing it to like-minded people. I mean selling it to a big conglomerate that is going to be concerned about nothing but profit, will change the site completely and get rid of the staff for cheaper people, no guarantees in the contract about maintaining it in a certain way, keeping at least the heart of it (like Ars), etc. Just take the biggest wad of cash that can be solicited and never look back. The new owners just assimilate and it becomes no different from other sites, purchased only for the name and existing audience and then executives (as always) think they can change it completely and that audience won't leave. Obviously a new audience can come in, and when they redesign it to appeal to a broader group it can continue to be successful, but it's not the same site, and it's just mass entertainment rather than art.

 

[Made in Hurry]

I remember Abit well

SOYO, FIC, DFI... It was fun back then.

I haven't visited Anandtech for years, but it was a daily site back in the day.

 

[MadMac_5]

I'd always go to Anandtech for CPU reviews on launch, until the past four years or so when they'd been beaten to the punch by Phoronix for productivity and Gamers Nexus/Hardware Unboxed for gaming. The ads and auto-playing videos on Anandtech made the whole reading experience a pain, but I still go back there for archive information about retro PC parts since they reviewed them at the time they were launched and usually a generation later to show what could be gained by upgrading. RIP to one of the formative sites of my hardware knowledge!

 

[Nevarre]

All the respect to Anandtech and the folks who worked there and did generally excellent work. I'm massively frustrated that video media (no matter how good it is) has taken all the wind out of the sails for much easier to parse written media, but...

Anand leaving in 2014 for Apple was bad sign number one. Future buying them in 2018 was not necessarily a positive either, but at least they left Dr. Cutress in charge. When Ian left in 2022 the writing was on the wall. They needed help to elevate the product and Future didn't prioritize them at all it seems.

 

[rodalpho]

Ian wasn’t the editor, he was a contributor. He has a YouTube video up going through his history at Anandtech and his view on its final end if you’re interested.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY

 

[SportivoA]

Geeze. They were probably the longest running entry in my RSS reader or at least up there in reasons why I started using it. Obviously they lasted longer than Google Reader, so I can't really check when that was. While their content got thinner, there was still good stuff to read, even not buying the latest of each generation. I've added a couple of the mentioned contemporary sites to my reader in a hope of filling in some of the content. The pivot to video has not done me any good, but my spending habits certainly don't lend much value to my opinion for the industry at large. I learned a lot from them, but will have to see where else things are. The world moves on (along).

 

[Cool Modine]

The Bench was really a great feature. It hasn’t been fully maintained for years though, slowly dying on the vine. At this point I’m not surprised that the site is shutting down. But I am saddened by the news.

 

[continuum]

So sad. Anandtech, as much as the cracks were starting to show through the past couple of months (at least two articles, one of which I firmly recall was supposedly written by Gavin-- but instead both articles looked like poorly vetted ChatGPT/LLM/AI bot-written garbage, several comments by Ryan Smith, the current editor in chief, at least addressed it/denied it in the comments/whatnot)....

... but even to the end, their last article being the AMD Zen 5 reviews, they remained my primary go-to for CPU, GPU, memory deep dives. To a lesser extent SSDs and PSUs but those faded long before the end as the primary contributors behind those left earlier.


Tom's Hardware at least looks like it has absorbed some Anandtech contributors, and we have the recent emergence of Chips and Cheese at least for CPU and GPU architecture stuff. That reminds me, I need to make another donation to Chips and Cheese.

Ian wasn’t the editor, he was a contributor.

Technically he was Senior Editor for CPUs.

https://www.anandtech.com/home/about/https://www.linkedin.com/in/iancutress/
Anyway. This makes me sad.

/me pours one out for SilentPCReview, Techreport, HardOCP, David Kanter's long-abandoned site, and a few others...

 

[Garfield the Cat]

Great site ~15 years ago, but like others said, once Anand left, it went downhill. Seems like the tech companies figured out it is just easier to hire the owners of review sites so they can't get bad reviews. Tech Report, HardOcp, Anandtech, JonnysPSU reviews (and maybe others?) all got jobs with tech companies and then their websites went downhill.

 

[rodalpho]

It certainly went downhill since the pandemic, but the site remained great for many years after Anand sold it with people like Cutress, Smith, and Ganesh putting in their time. Many of the others were largely one-man shows, once Kyle left HardOCP there wasn't anyone else.

 

[Nevarre]

Great site ~15 years ago, but like others said, once Anand left, it went downhill. Seems like the tech companies figured out it is just easier to hire the owners of review sites so they can't get bad reviews. Tech Report, HardOcp, Anandtech, JonnysPSU reviews (and maybe others?) all got jobs with tech companies and then their websites went downhill.

I wrote a long Battlefront piece about that when we were in the thick of it. Add PC Perspective's Ryan Shrout as a major one-- he's now the PR mouthpiece for Intel's enthusiast product lines. I fall on the side of the argument that for most of those hires, at least "if hiring those people would result in the sites being sold/transferred/shut down, then the hiring company would not be sad about it" if not being a calculated move to shut down the sites. Anand Lal Shimpi might be in a similar position, but he was hired by Apple and hired in 2015, a year or two before the real crisis started happening.

Prefacing this by saying that a lot of the tech videos are VERY good (some more toward the pure entertainment end of the spectrum) but channels like Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus do at least the same quality as web-based written media did 15 years ago. Those guys make bank. Pretty much any written word format struggles mightily for ad revenue and access. Companies are happy to send free review hardware to YouTubers with a moderate following, but some of the sites struggle for the same access and have trended towards their sites being a 2nd career, not their day jobs (or an adjunct to their video content.) It's just a frustrating reality. I want charts and graphs and details that I can sit and read, and re-read, and compare, and analyze and then build a good picture in my mind of how something performs and works. It may not be as engaging to read an entire multi-page article, but sometimes you need all that detail. That's less annoying than pausing the video when they show a chart, but that's what we're stuck with now.

 

[rodalpho]

Not entirely, GamersNexus and (soon) Linus have full written writeups with great detail available. I get the feeling they’re doing it just because they want to, and don’t expect them to even break even.

 

[Anonymous Chicken]

I wonder if the parallel writeups are a cost-effective way to funnel eyes to the better-paying youtube content. A lot of potential search terms in a long text.

 

[rodalpho]

My feeling is that answer is probably no, they're separate audiences. Written content is for reference and the greybeards. But it's an interesting question worth asking in a livestream or something if you're into that stuff.

 

[hobold]

I wonder if the parallel writeups are a cost-effective way to funnel eyes to the better-paying youtube content. A lot of potential search terms in a long text.

That's entirely up to Google, who control both web search and video search. They can make up whatever rules they want to cross promote or punish those who do both video and text.

 

[N00balicious]

AnandTech has some good reviews.

As a couple of folks commented in the article, I'm bummed that there is one less source of long-form reviews out-there.

I'm not a fan of the YouTube reviews. They're fine to watch once for the edutainment, but I'd have to take notes or watch them more than once to catch everything they throw at the viewer. That's a burden.

GamersNexus AKA GN is probably the best of what's left?

 

[Peldor]

What really cheeses me is that TechReport has turned into a stupid cryptocoin shilling zombie of a website, and even though you can find old articles, the image links are dead and the formatting is broken (at least in my experience). It's kind of gross how much passion and effort went into the work and how quickly that's just tossed aside.

Hopefully the archives at AnandTech don't suffer the same fate.

 

[Nevarre]

My feeling is that answer is probably no, they're separate audiences. Written content is for reference and the greybeards. But it's an interesting question worth asking in a livestream or something if you're into that stuff.

At least for now you can't google search the content of a YouTube video. Neither LTT nor GN were print-first media. GN had the stub of a website for a very long time, and LTT always had a presence that was very forum-heavy. It's not like those folks existed solely within YouTube and the likewise ephemeral and hard-to-search realm of social media, but it wasn't ever their sole job where we see other outlets branching out to do the occasional video or do a podcast on the regular, they were print- or written-only at one point in time.

Right now, searching on "part X vs part Y" or "reviews on component Z" have a high tendency to send you to chum sites like UserBenchmark or Versus or any number of other clones that generate large amounts of Google-indexable data that may or may not have any value.

I'm not saying that video reviews are worse or less desirable than written reviews or anything of the sort. I love both kinds of content. I am saying that one of them pays (for the elite) a lot of money, and one of them pays so little it's a side hustle or a business running on a shoestring and even the most successful in print-first media are still going to cap out on income long LONG before the Linus Sebastians of the world...

 

[Nevarre]

AnandTech has some good reviews.

As a couple of folks commented in the article, I'm bummed that there is one less source of long-form reviews out-there.

I'm not a fan of the YouTube reviews. They're fine to watch once for the edutainment, but I'd have to take notes or watch them more than once to catch everything they throw at the viewer. That's a burden.

GamersNexus AKA GN is probably the best of what's left?

They're not alone but it's getting thinner. For video that isn't just rehashing of tech news, GN is probably the best, Hardware Unboxed is very solid. Jay is in the mix somewhere although he's made a niche as a watercooling enthusiast and that niche is in trouble right now. MLID exists, but his stuff is long and rambly and nobody knows how much of what he's saying is BS and what is industry leaks. There are others that lean a little more towards news aggregator/pundit than reviewer, but I think Paul's Hardware straddles that line well. He's not strictly rehashing news. If you want rehashed news and not much else, that exists too-- Gamer'sMeld comes to mind.

In written media, PC World is still kicking with a few luminaries still there (I think Gordon Mah Ung is back to some level of participation after cancer treatment) and PC Perspective is still around and of course Ars Technica doesn't just do car reviews. Tom's Hardware still exists. There are more for both types of media, but the generalist sites start to get thin, and you start finding more niche content where 15-20 years ago there was meaningful competition and more smart people trying to figure out how to do better reviews instead of trying to figure out how to make payroll...

 

[Anonymous Chicken]

TechReport has turned into a stupid cryptocoin shilling zombie of a website

I'm a refugee from TechReport. :-( Anandtech and Toms were always unreadable. IMO.

Well, I was reading Ars when TR "forked" off IIRC, and here I am still. Nearly the last site standing.