A sad day. My buddy and I were the original developers of anandtech when it went live running on cold fusion and oracle as the backend. I started a hosting company and hosted anadtrch for a few years. Lots of memories there.
I remember religiously checking the hot deals forum then for insane dot com boom pricing choices (and errors). Fun times. A bunch of us moved to IRC but then Fatwallet sort of ruined things w their volume of users.
It was super ahead of it's time with all the crazy functionality and connection.. flowed together really smoothly.
I think there's a need for this kind of thing still, if you have a passion for it you should consider reimagining what kind of content could be needed in 2024.
YC seems to like the kind of esoteric knowledge you probably have.
I retired from tech after 40 years this spring. Im now a farmer in the middle of nowhere.
The big thing i see missing from long ago times is a real sense of community and an all in one site ( article , forums etc). They try and some are decent but there just isnt the connection and i dont think that will ever return. I think reddit and the like sucked all that away from sites and the audience is much much broader so i feel they lose some of that “likemidedness” i dunno im just old and cant really relate to the younger “techies” of today.
Yea we worked on his old site before anadtech. Sheesh so much fun at CES with the gang in lv. Was fun times. My buddy started fusetalk by writing anadtech forums from scratch. It all moved to .net after a couple years and that when i left. Jason stayed on for years
Anandtech is how I learned what Ubuntu is. I must have been about 10 years old, and the concept of any OS besides Windows or MacOS was completely foreign to me. Within a few weeks, I had dug an old laptop out of my dad's bin of "stuff work wasn't using anymore" and I managed to put Ubuntu on it. I think it was an HP. I don't remember the exact specs but I do remember that the GPU was failing, there were weird video glitches all the time, and the battery held a charge for about 15 minutes.
That was my first experience with Linux. That broken-ass computer was what I used when I learned Arduino. I'm now a firmware engineer, writing this comment on my work laptop, which is running Ubuntu.
Makes me feel old. I was at uni when Ubuntu came out. But my story was similar to yours in the mid 90s and I got hold of a walnut creek cd with Slackware from some PC mag, a couple floppy disks and discarded hardware and I was off to the races
There was something about discovering tech through dedicated tech sites back then that felt exciting.
Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
> Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
If you're getting old, then I must be too, because I know your pain. I don't remember the last time I saw new tech(1) that felt like a real novelty to me.
Now that I've been fully in "career mode" for a few years, I have the budget to engage in my hobbies with greater depth than ever before, and that's amazing. Yet, I've found myself going deeper and deeper into the "retro." Old computers, old cameras, old music formats, etc. It's easier to find novelty there.
(1): this is limited to tech. There's great new music that isn't too hard to come by if you can manage to train Spotify's algorithm to give it to you.
Yeah dang my first linux install was at about the same age but it was Red Hat (not RHEL or Fedora). I remember most of my time was spent trying to get my network drivers working properly.
Very sad, but Anandtech has been on a downslope since Anand left. Once that happened it seemed like they almost instantly went from publishing many times a week to only occasionally pushing out content, usually quite delayed. The quality was still very good though and I always tried to find an Anandtech review of whatever it was I was looking for. Did the publishers just cheap out and stop paying for enough articles? Or did people lose motivation when they found themselves working for a faceless corp instead of Anand?
I don't blame the site for this, though. Anand got out at about the same time as marketing overtook technological improvement in product development (for the most part). I remember the very early days (I lived just a couple miles from Anand in the Raleigh area) where he was doing super in-depth assessments at the board & chip level, through the rapidly changing evolution of motherboards, CPUs & GPUs in the early 2000s ... but as everything basically became mostly commoditized and user experience differences have reduced even for home-built PCs (and the number of people still home-building PCs, period!), there just hasn't been a compelling reason to continue this depth of analysis or writing for the past decade or so.
> marketing overtook technological improvement in product development
I would say another key change is things just becoming less modular over time.
Like, the chipset used to be a major factor in choosing your motherboard, but it just doesn't matter anymore. Third-party chipsets are no longer a thing, and there's little difference between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a full integrated northbridge now.
And honestly, today's PCs are powerful enough that there's no point in even bothering to make optimal choices. You could pick mediocre parts for all your stuff and still end up with a beast. It's not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you'd feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.
I used to be a regular reader of AnandTech since the early 2000s and the delays are what drove me off the site. Specifically when the Nvidia GTX 1080 launched on May 27, 2016. The AnandTech review came out 2 months later on July 20, 2016. [1] I had no problem waiting a whole week, but after that it was getting ridiculous. They just didn't serve their readers.
After I found replacement reviewers, mostly on YouTube, for my in depth reviews, I never went back to regularly visiting AnandTech. Their time had already passed in 2016 as far as I'm concerned. Not only were they delayed, but their reviews weren't even the most in depth any more.
What ads? Seriously, though, when Anand and Ian left was about the time the content started losing quality, the ads started increasing, and I removed the site from my adblocker's whitelist.
Around the year 2000 (don't remember exactly) there were 3 sites I checked daily: Anandtech, Tom's Hardware and XBit Labs. Since Anand and Thomas sold their sites the quality dropped enough that in the past few years I rarely opened any of these sites (except Xbitlabs that does not exist for a long time). In some way, Anand and Thomas were the souls that left the bodies.
Yeah, I also noted that. In 2014 Anandtech was acquired by the same company that ran Tomshardware, the two sites were among the most popular in their segment. I never shook off the feeling that after the acquisition it was left to die.
A testament to the quality of Anandtech is that in 2011 I started a job at Micron on their SSD team and the first thing they said was to go read some articles on anandtech about how SSDs work. They covered slc vs mlc, trim, etc in better detail and in a more approachable way than anything else.
I've leaned on Anandtech ever since as a go-to source for understand technical innovation in hardware. Thanks for making everything that much easier to understand.
I learnt about intel processors on Anandtech. Everything from how the L1, L2 & L3 caches work during the time of Nehalem, Haswell, Ivybridge, Sandy bridge... the ticks and the tocks. 3D Nand, flash storage and a whole bunch of other things explained there.
Yes I remember reading one of those SSD articles about mlcs and it was so well written, quality knowledge captured on the internet. I hope someone starts up another anandtech like website
Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks, and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain segment of it.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)
> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
People would pay for far more if charged a nominal markup over what their readership is considered worth when subsidized by ads.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV bundle model that sucked.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
> I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.
but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work?
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations.
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports.
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
> And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
> Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
Anantech was the high watermark in tech journalism and the only place I'd go to look at in-depth (sometimes beyond belief) reviews of Apple hardware test results not found anywhere else on the web. Page after page after page of detailed tests and results.
Hard to imagine that type of content being lucrative from a display-ad point of view if they used traditional ad networks, but the effort was absolutely appreciated and respected by readers.
A sad day but considering how the online ad market has tried to force publishers to focus on video content an understandable one for printed-word journalists. It's awful.
This is true, and I second your sadness. They always had those 1/2/3 pages more than competitors about architecture details at the start of every review.
But apparently right now it pays more to do a cheap video review on YouTube with fake benchmarks, you get the hundred thousands video views, sell the hardware and call it a day.
Reviews for components are better in written form than video form, yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using. I guess it doesn't help that it feels like there hasn't been an increase in performance to price ratio for GPU's in the longest time.
I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing, but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my way to what I'm looking for very quickly.
I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.
Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared to text. I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster than an equivalent video, they aren't even in the same ballpark. It boggles my mind that so many people prefer videos, given how much slower they are. It's enough to make me cynically wonder if people these days are illiterate or something.
Google has been trialing AI overviews of youtube videos, essentially it opens a gemini chat where gemini has been prompt-stuffed with the whole video.
A 12 minute "Here is my favorite method for unclogging a drain" video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini telling you what it is.
I don't know how google is gonna get this past creators if they fully role it out, as it is a massive shameless backstab, but at the same time it is wonderful for viewers who don't want to trudge through filler video after clickbait headlines.
I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.
It is partly the form, video, but more so the access method, the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through because the file isn't cached and takes a few milliseconds to several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface also doesn't help because usually they lack controls for skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and backwards.
I never understand the obsession with video. It's the first thing my kids reach for when searching for information about something and it's always painfully slow and inefficient.
Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?
I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume.
I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.
I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way.
In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.
If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do it compared to see they literally just presented the video script in article form and you could choose the graphs and time that matters to you.
Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z) that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like how to download VSCode.
Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren't giving the advantages they once used to.
You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a decade long head start and billions more invested in development.
We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment remains competitive with brand new products in terms of performance.
ARM has gotten very good, and is definitely competitive with mid-range x86 while offering better performance-per-watt, but it is still not competitive with high-end x86.
What do die shrinks have to do with ISA performance? Also, there are no RISC-V CPUs available that match the latest X86 or ARM CPUs. Even then, the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).
Yeah I keep looking into upgrading my 12 year old PC, but for like £1500 I can get one 10x faster (multithreaded) and only about 4x faster single core. I mean, that's a decent boost but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.
Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video & merch money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site: https://gamersnexus.net/
It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done
The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.
DC Rainmaker (sports gadgets reviews) has a nice compromise of having product video reviews on Youtube, but also even more in-depth reviews with all the tables and charts on his website. I used to read his written reviews, now I mostly skim his videos.
The ridiculously high prices of GPUs have really taken the fun out of hardware for me. I used to follow hardware developments closely, but now I upgrade much less often so that also stopped.
I agree but it's a little deceptive. For example I have a 4070 right now and I paid $600 for it. That's good money but it is more than likely far more than most people actually need.
If you watch or read reviews, you'd think only people in poverty use 4070s. I play competitive games and everything else I want to do with this card without issues and even with gas left in the tank.
They crank up settings in reviews to ultra settings and then try to make it look like if you don't have a $1200 GPU that you have trash. Reality is that these GPUs are overkill and in many games medium settings look nearly identical to ultra. I swear GPU manufacturers pay to have ultra settings available, with their nearly imperceptible improvements. The option is mostly there as far as I can tell, simply to upsell GPUs.
The comments about "AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting" are interesting.
Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you're doing these things.
Which I suspect ties back to things like Google (and others) neglecting the quality of organic search, pushing it down the page, etc. Or competing with quality content by exposing it in snippets and AI summaries with only subtle ways to get to the actual article.
I suppose, if that's the case, those practices eventually eat their own tail. No new Anandtech content to ignore or copy now, for example.
There is an alternative history where Google and FB et al. didn’t eat up all the advertising revenue that used to sustain good journalism.
It might be impossible to have independent journalism with the internet as it currently is.
I don’t know what the alternative is, but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month. This might have trained internet folks to go to the news websites for news and kept the economics propped up a bit better than the disaster it currently is.
My guess is that this would be even worse for news sites as it would lower their overall traffic. Certainly seems to be the case in Canada. I don’t get the sense that search engines/fb/etc are the problem. Rather it’s 1) loss of classified ads and 2) competition from all the free content provided in blogs, posts, tweets and so on. Why pay to read an uninformed opinion piece when you can get it for free scrolling through your X feed?
Absolutely. As someone who spent about 5 years working in local news a bit over a decade ago, it wasn't the search engines or Facebook that killed us, it was craigslist. Especially business classifieds, while not individually big $$$, they added up. We had some edge in content quality for a while, but the classifieds drying up led to deep cuts in the newsroom, and then there was nothing separating us from the local TV stations who also had superficial coverage, but got it out much quicker.
To get a full picture of what happened to journalism, we can't just blame Google and Facebook, we have to acknowledge all the years people stopped going to websites and only got their news on Google and Facebook. Those companies gave people what they said they wanted, or what they didn't outright say they wanted but silently expressed through their actions. Neither party cared that what they were doing was bad for the health of the web (to say nothing of journalism or the culture). If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.
I guess fundamentally I agree with this, but the user experience on most online publications is, and has been, wow, for more than two decades, I think, so bad that every time I'm forced to experience it, I can't even get through a single article before I get so repulsed in worst cases I get an actual negative physical reaction. And it's getting worse as time goes by.
I get that online publications have to advertise, but to do it with auto-play video w/ audio of unrelated content, animated/video ads, ads for items you already bought a month ago, the outright scam ads, SEO garbage ("this one trick to get a supermodel girlfriend"), superstitials blocking content, dark pattern ads (e.g. x icon opens a link rather than closes the ad), ads that move and hover on the page when you scroll down.
I could go on for longer, but I'm getting that same negative physical reaction by simply describing this crap.
Another version of this discussion that comes up frequently is something like the "Support local businesses!" thing, where we're supposed to spend more money at the local diner and ignore a chain like Denny's.. but Denny's is open 24 hours. And people should use Mom+Pop's furniture store, even though they can get a better price plus light bulbs, and the rest of the groceries from Walmart. And we need to use less water during my showers, and ignore the golf courses or the chip factory down the road.
The idea of being a "responsible consumer" at most just delays the inevitable shutdown for a few years, because economies of scale is a real thing. Moralizing to people that they need to spend more money / time / convenience / change their habits isn't effective, because even if consumers are genuinely interested in making sacrifices in exchange for quality, everything that's independent is closing anyway when the small owners sell out to whoever is buying. Those who thrive on mergers and acquisition don't care whether consumers are "responsible".
Consumers aren't children or robots, but we also don't have any choice or agency.. in the US at least there are 4-5 companies that make 80% of the groceries you buy. Telecommunications and media are going to look even worse, depending on how you want to measure it. As much as I hate to say it, it looks like only big government can protect us from big business. So yes, blaming big tech is missing the point, but so is blaming consumers. Write your congressman I guess? Wish I could write his economist instead though.. for whatever reason discouraging monopolies doesn't seem to work, so maybe we should look instead at deliberately incentivizing variety.
The "professional" journalists were all to happy to load their sites with chum boxes and native ads disguised as articles. The search aggregators don't expose that crap.
> If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.
This is a remarkably-astute comment. The problem is that it is very difficult for people to be aware, in any given moment, that a seemingly-innocuous action they're taking now will have devastating consequences in a decade or a century or more. This is made more difficult by well-heeled commercial interests which are highly motivated to discourage such insight. Ultimately, one of the roles of government, and it seems strange to say this, is to develop laws which paternalistically protect people from themselves. As an example of this, see privacy/data protection legislation for the internet, e.g. GDPR. As a counter example, see any country which very deliberately avoids developing privacy legislation for the internet.
> what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month
News sites would probably change whatever metadata Google is using to check site age to make their news articles appear one-day-more-than-month old to Google crawlers, all as a part of Search Engine Optimization techniques.
There is a trivial solution to this. Store your own copy (or hash, or whatever) of the article and don't rank it until your copy is at least a month old.
The idea is still nonesense because some other search engine will show up without this restriction, and any news site would prefer to be listed there, rather than not.
I dont believe your perception is accurate. I worked for Knight Ridder during this time, and print news was already a walking corpse. Cable/satellite news channels, and broadcast tv, and even radio before that had worn away the primacy of print. By the 2000s circulation had been dropping for decades. Local/regional newspapers were surviving on classifieds and local ad buys, which was eaten up by craigslist and ad exchanges generally.
At that point, 2000ish, there wasnt much newspaper journalism left to be sustained. Most US print news was gannett and knight ridder recycling AP/reuters wire stories. A handful of national/global mastheads could sustain real investigative reporters and foreign bureaus, for a little while.
Personally I dont see how (quality) “free to read” news persists. Quality and depth is the differentiation, and the consumer needs to pay for it. Id bet more on the bloomberg/the economist/stratfor models continuing in to the future.
Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of obsessively in-depth coverage. Ian Cutress has been doing his thing as well, but erred mostly on the side of being a philosopher rather than an investigator. Interested to see where all the people end up. Clearly the demand for good info hasn't vanished.
> Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of obsessively in-depth coverage.
Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
It's sad how much information is moving to a much slower and data-intensive medium. The same is happening in lots of other areas as well, like game development. Articles always been easier for me to consume, but more and more valuable information is moving into videos these days that it's hard to avoid even though I prefer other mediums...
> Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
I recall them talking about how they prefer writing articles, especially given how info-dumpy their content tends to be, but videos are what actually pays the bills.
Completely agree. I am listening to some chill music and wanting to catch up on some hardware reviews, so I want to read a nice article. If I accidentally click on something that takes me to a god awful yt video, it completely disrupts my focus and irritates the hell out me. I instantly close the tab and never go back to whatever source pointed me there. I absolutely loathe yt video content of stuff that should obviously be text but isn't. Gaming content has gone this way a lot sadly.
This reminds me of how shocked I was when memes using image macros started becoming a thing around 2008 or so. I still remembered the bad old days of dial up and waiting tens of seconds for images to load and thought it was so horridly inefficient to convey a message that way.
Now we have HD videos pushing the same (and arguably worse) content taking tens if not hundreds of MBs and conveying the same information that is much harder to parse than a text file could do in a few kilobytes.
I feel like I am having my old man yells at cloud moment here, but its a hugely inferior medium.
I feel like the "Cable TV-ification" applies to them, some of the videos are very much sensationalism. The host also comes off as a bit too full of themselves
That's so sad. Farewell and thanks for everything!
For me, the beginning of the end was when Anand and Brian Klug both moved to Apple. While I bet that they're doing great things there, I've been significantly less fascinated by new hardware, and in particular Apple hardware, ever since.
Shiny exteriors and magical features might appeal to many, but to me, somebody explaining in all detail what makes it work doesn't take anything away from the magic – quite the opposite.
This times 1000. I loved their deeply technical reviews and articles. I got hooked early on their CPU and GPU deep dives and their mobile deep dives in the 2010s.
I've been reading them since before my teenage years and they got me interested in the insides of tech enough for me to pursue and gain my degree in Computer Engineering. It definitely changed when Anand and Brian left, but end of an era now that the site is shutting down.
Of course they're doing great things, but my point is that they're trying hard to keep it a secret how they're doing them. Compare what Apple is revealing about their chips with what Intel used to present back when they were the market leader, for example.
Anandtech was great at exploring these secrets and presenting their findings in a great way. That's what I miss.
> Finally, for everyone who still needs their technical writing fix, our formidable opposition of the last 27 years and fellow Future brand, Tom’s Hardware, is continuing to cover the world of technology.
I thought Tom’s Hardware was very consumer oriented, and didn’t go into nearly as much detail the way AnandTech did.
> And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely.
This is often not how these things go, and Future PLC deserves credit for good citizenship.
Wow. What a run, though. This is a hard business. I know, I ran a similar thing that was ever so briefly popular in the late 90s. I kept at it for a couple of years and maybe had a couple of reviews and articles get significant traffic over that span. I let it drop when I graduated high school - college was definitely the better bet for me haha. Back then I wished I could do it as well as Anand did. And they did it for almost 3 decades. If any of you happen to see this, I’m sad to see AnandTech end, but what you started had an amazing almost 3 decade run and you should be proud. I’m proud of you - AT is the best.
> Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content
That’s the core of it. And too bad they’re off. Finding a news outlet that isn’t “tweeting” an article and isn’t a blog post on HN was great. And while they mention Tom’s hardware. It always felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.
Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means. Weird that I come across it so often, but never stopped to think what it means. :)
> Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means.
Fare is unrelated to fair:
> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) + well.*
I remember waaaaay back in the day when Tom’s Hardware was mocked as Tom’s Hotware because they did some testing of what would happen to AMD and Intel CPUs if the heat sink spontaneously fell off while they were running. I think at the time, the AMD CPU melted itself, which Tom’s Hardware criticized. It did seem back then that there was a subtle anti-AMD bias on the site, but I haven’t paid close attention to it over time. It’s interesting to hear that the accusations of Intel bias still exist!
I don't know your age but rest assured that when Anandtech started, and for the following 7-8 years, doing that was absolutely needed for a good user experience. Try loading a giant single page with dozens of images on a 28.8kbaud connection... It will not end well
No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.
I was really surprised they survived this long. Long, overly elaborate, badly structured, too technical, and hence boring for the average joe, kinda articles all around.
Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible website structure that is forced on every news outlet they own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.
The whole point of some of their articles was to go into the more esoteric technical details rather than gloss over them like some other sites. So in that aspect you are correct: it wasn’t for “the average joe”. However, for some people it was what they wanted.
That attention to technical detail and knowledge is why people like Der8auer have an audience today and people respect his opinion.
Once upon a time Real World Technology was even better, but met the same fate. If you can write these sorts of reviews you can make much more money as a consultant than from a website.
I was around when the ghz wars were happening. I remember reading SharkyExtreme, hothardware, 2CPU.com, hardocp, anandtech and others for their reviews.
Sad. Very sad. I almost wish they had not decided to close up shop. Instead spin out and go sub only.
This may not be a popular opinion, but this news reminds me how much I miss the Block-era Engadget, and even the old Gizmodo. Both have woven politics in so deeply and the writing at times so clearly uninformed that they are not enjoyable.
I was genuinely curious what type of politics a tech website like Gizmodo would get into. Then I saw they have a "politics" section, with 9 out of the 20 first articles with "Trump" in the headline. Now I understand.
At this point I’m more surprised when someone doesn’t find a way to work politics into whatever they are saying. We are well past the point when a site needed to have some plausible connection to politics to justify including it.
The number of random Kamala blow job innuendo comments I’ve seen posted in completely unrelated topics in the last few jobs is disheartening.
CPU Microarchitecture analysis was the best, after Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes retired from his site: Anand and Brian Klug and Ian Cutress; I'm certain I've overlooked a few stellar tech analysts.
Especially during the era when Intel was trying to wedge x86 into mobile and even wearable devices.
Of late, the site has been posting the occasional deep-dive hardware review (notably, PC power supplies by E. Fylladitakis) and industry breaking news (Ganesh, Anton Shilov), but it's all moved to Tom's Hardware.
This makes me incredibly sad. Nothing lasts forever, but AT has been a part of my life since it launched, when I was a teen obsessed with computers. I didn't feel so sad when Slashdot or The Inquirer declined, maybe because they were in decline over a long period. But AT was special, they only declined in review frequency, not quality.
Quality journalism struggles to turn a profit. Soon we will only have a grey goo web, created by LLMs endlessly recycling each other's output in a race to the bottom. Sad face.
There was time I read Tom's Hardware and thought that was the top of tech journalism and reviews,until the (i don't remember when) a revamp to the site that focused more on news. Then I found anandtech, reading all in depth article from the marketing material down to architecture level. It was very eye opening, the quality and depth is even on higher level.
I was sad when Ian left, but now it's the ultimate sadness.
There was a time in early 2000's when both sites were great and very competitive. I was reading both to see what opinions they have about products they both reviewed. Quality was very good on both sites, it changed later.
Man this is sad … I think I’ve been visiting this site for its entire lifetime. AnandTech has always been the best place for unbiased, deeply technical looks at hardware and it will be greatly missed
I was going to say ArsTechinica which I have fond memories of from many years ago, but I just took a look and I don’t even recognize it - looks more like engadget. So, no, not recommending.
Ars Technica is more of a general tech and science news site. They do some computer hardware and phone reviews, but nowhere near what a dedicated tech site does, and they're often not Day 1 reviews.
I find their content generally pretty high quality for their niche (with Beth Mole's and Eric Berger's content being my personal standouts), but Ars Technica is by no means a substitute for a site like AnandTech.
Any other sites folks would recommend? It doesn't look to me like the sites mentioned have the same mix of stories as Anand would have covered. I'd like something that's really in the same vein.
Anandtech was one of my earliest sources of highly quality tech reporting. In particular their reliance on data and testing always stood out.
Many hours were spent there during my formative years. And, while I did stop reading it regularly at University, it had already played an important part in informing, and so shaping me.
It would be extremely interesting to understand the detail of why anandtech can't function any more. Is it just too low-paid for core contributors, who could get more elsewhere? Is it the cost of running servers? What're the things that cause a web-based company like this to (seemingly) abruptly stop?
The quality of their content, back when they still produced any, was top. It always felt to me that the life departed with Ian. Ian's substack fills the place for me that AnandTech used to.
Uni had fiber to the dorm room, so I was interested in maximizing available bandwidth through the rest of the system. Which in P4 / PCI days wasn't trivial!
Ironically enough, I still have that motherboard downstairs in a backup system, humming away... with a Pentium M via adapter. :)
Couldn't bring myself to put it out to pasture, and thought it was an interesting inflection point as "the last of the Netburst" era.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite uni classes was on microprocessor design, taught by someone who apparently taught Anand at NC (Tom Conte).
RIP. But better to call it quits when they're playing the send-off music.
As far as Anandtech's published article history that has to be kept online or else so much Wikipedia content will lose the Anandtech article references that are used heavily there and in other places online!
So the status of that content needs to be discussed and how that can be preserved!
For anyone here working or in contact with the people at Future: the post mentions that the forums are still going to be open, but will there be any active work on it?
I keep thinking that these specialized forums that lost space to Reddit could be revived if were integrated with ActivityPub.
> And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely.
I remember reading their review for the Core 2 Duo E7500, which was my first foray into PCMR back in 2009 along with a GTX 260. FSB multipliers were fun!
Quite sad, we lost two of the greatest tech journalism of yesteryears, Game Informer and now Anandtech.
Maximum PC barely hung on and later were boughtout by PCgamer.
I doubt anything will replace the in-depth tech journalism of Anandtech without visible paid biases and manipulation by big tech. I think Video centric media tech houses will rule the roost like Linus Media, GamerNexus and HuB.
Hoping Igors lab, chips&cheese and der8auer to carry the baton forward.
I will kiss an old LGA 775 processor in their honor, rest in circuits.
I will really miss this site. They did incredible deep reviews of tech.
But once Anand left, the site started dying. They posted 1 review a month, and didn't even cover the iphone or galaxy or pixel launches. How on earth was that meant to survive?
It's shocking to realize I've been reading AnandTech's insightful and profound analysis for over two decades. The tech landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation in that time, yet AnandTech remained a steadfast and reliable source of information. They inspired countless hardware enthusiasts and reviewers, myself included, with many of us pursuing performance analysis as a career path. Their absence will be deeply felt, and it's truly a sad day for the tech community.
This makes me so sad. AnandTech was the leading, consistently reliable source of technical information and opinion that informed my views on so many products. And it was immensely fun to read. Its departure leaves a sore gap in my technology assessment toolkit, and a heaviness in my heart.
I hope tomorrow's enthusiasts take up the torch of deep technical reporting and fight back against all the shallow, clickbait reporting out there.
One thing I can take from this is that even when you are not necessarily building all that cool/complex tech yourself, whatever else you are good at, take a good hard look at it. What ever is important to you, you can always apply what you are good at to some facet of what you admire and find value. Anandtech folks learned a lot about cool tech standing on the shoulders of giants, but they added value by teaching us what is really significant to look for and then benchmarking the hell out of it.
Distilling what you like about a thing and then build it (and don't forget that finding someone to pay you to do it is essential too) is key. Intellectual honesty is key in this process: You have to be honest about what you like about the Acquisition, Assimilation, and Dissemination of your ideas and product. They did that so well.
I always thought that whatever I wanted to build, it has something complex(and hence cool), but it could instead just what I want and have it be cool anyway.
Real Shame. Does make me think what kind of business model is needed for this type of publication to survive and thrive? There must be a way ... I would really hope. Would be very curious at to the conversations that happened at Future PLC prior to shutting this asset down. Couldn't find much on companies fillings.
Yeah- I am personally struggling to understand how a website could be successful in 1997 run out of an apartment, but now that the PC and tech industry is many times bigger these sites can't make a go of it. And the headwinds Anand and Ars etc faced... I remember back in the 90s they wouldn't let them into Computex and CES.
Interestingly it was just last week that I was looking into building a NAS (Synology is leaning in hard on enshitification lately) and its suprisingly feasible, and I was wondering why no one talks about motherboards anymore, only CPUs/GPUs, and occasionally disks (spinning rust or solid state)- I thought I might have just been mentally ignoring those articles, but they really don't exist anymore. Ars/Anand/Toms had reviews for models once every 6 months or so.
Into the graveyard you go with, Aces Hardware, Sharky Extreme, Thresh's Firingsquad, and I am sure I am forgetting others that I used to load up every day but just don't exist anymore.
I'm sad to hear that they're shutting down. I thought that Anandtech would be one of the holdouts for written tech journalism in a world that's become increasingly video first.
What are people reading these days for hardware reviews?
I find that Notebookcheck and GSMArena are decent for laptop and phone reviews respectively.
A very sad, but not unexpected, end to another important source of quality journalism. Outcompeted, no doubt, by the noise & churn of the attention economy.
I hope they open source their benchmarking procedures. It’s valuable to see the results of comparable testing across multiple generations of hardware.
Breaks my heart. Grew up reading AnandTech in the early 2010s for all things hardware -- processor releases, updates to the DDR SDRAM standard, motherboard and NAND flash reviews.
The era of unbiased, objective and deeply technical journalism is dying out. Sad.
> now, more than ever, it’s necessary to counter sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions. To quote Anand: “I don't believe the web needs to be academic reporting or sensationalist garbage - as long as there's a balance, I'm happy.”
A postscript deep dive article for AnandTech could look at the audience and business metrics of an ad-funded tech review site in 2024, in the context of competition from substack, Discord/Patreon, YouTube, neo-cable-tv, and other channels.
Does Algolia have enough data for a graph of AnandTech article discussions on HN, e.g. submissions and comments?
AnandTech was one of the websites that helped me as a child. I found it around 2002, and the clear-headed manner in which it discussed chip fabrication, function, lithography and the associated engineering and scientific foundations of them - as well as general concepts of bios, motherboard, chipsets, slots, bandwidth etc - helped foster a curiosity and familiarity with electronic hardware that has served me well for my whole life.
It helped me dream larger than my surroundings; which in turn helped me get out of an unstable home, poverty, and a dead-end town. I was sad when [H]ardOCP went down, but this hits different.
Thanks to an in-depth Anandtech review way back in 2011, I purchased a super cheap Dell Vostro laptop with a staggering 8 hours of battery life, pretty much unheard of for Windows laptops at the time. Plenty of OEMs would straight up lie, but AT's battery tests provided the proof consumers needed.
It's sad to see the state of 'tech journalism' in the Youtube age when it comes to hardware products. I feel like I'm watching a 20-minute lifestyle commercial rather than an actual nuts-and-bolts review. I guess that's what gets views and affiliate link revenue now.
This is really tragic. I understand the pressures that Anandtech is under, and of course they've just been doing it for so long that I have to think Ryan and team are burnt out, but what a bummer! AFAIK Anandtech is unique at least in the English-language internet. It's going to leave a huge hole.
I'm glad the forums continue and hope they thrive. Those forums are where I started my tech support journey 20+ years ago. It'll be interesting to see if Toms can fill in some of the more in-depth, technical and objective reporting.
I feel so nostalgic when these old places close up shop. I remember visiting AnandTech in the late 90s when I was still struggling to install Linux. Back when brick and mortar software stores were still a thing, staffed by like minded nerds who were happy to guide a young one and share knowledge.
I can't think of many other sites that have been around this long. https://www.bluesnews.com/ for gaming news comes to mind. It's been going since 96.
I think the underrated aspect of the downfall is just how much tech was for the lack of a better word commoditized. I used to be the target audience, but even I don't really care that much anymore about all the details -- my last PC was built over 10 years ago, and when my laptop dies I will again buy a laptop that is the best combination of performance and hassle free. And the new generation that still cared never peeked beyond YouTube, which is definitely true.
It's actually crazy how fast new media became old media.
I'm glad to hear the website will stay up, for now.
This makes me wonder if there's a way to preserve websites indefinitely in ebook form. A small device that contains the entire history of a website, and is self-contained in the ebook. The device would obviously require power and the hardware could degrade, but this could be mitigated by making the hardware replaceable, or rather the content swappable across devices.
It seems like a middle ground between durability/portability (printed book) and usability/access (website).
Sad to read this, AnandTech has been one of the good and respectable sites all these decades. Old-timers (like myself) will for sure miss their reviews.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
That wish didn't involve a world where search engines were intentionally tweaking their algos to serve up low-effort blogspam with zero individuality, burying actual hobbyist websites.
Wow, so sad to see it go... this was one of my main websites in the early days of the net. Helped me build so many computers and loved the community. I even built a website with some of the Anandtech team that consolidated reviews across the net during college. Sad day. Change be changing.
I am disturbed by the death of long-form content happening. Google is failing.
I felt a deep sadness after reading just the first paragraph, and I had to stop there for a while. It's very powerful. If you run your own business(es), you know how challenging it is. The stories of unicorns (epsilons) are rare and almost insignificant compared to the reality faced by most businesses.
I read Toms Hardware before AT even existed. Toms had a dark era for a while, but Anandtech has fallen off hard for years now. It hasn't been worth even visiting. I still visit Tom's though! For me, this is a fitting end that I started with Tom's and still reading it as AT shuts down.
It's very sad but not unexpected. Hard to live off advertising when your demographics are prime adblock users. I did disable adblock on AnandTech when I remembered to, and gritted my teeth at how awful it was to have ads covering every square millimeter of free space.
Anandtech, Slashdot, etc. These are some of the best websites that I followed throughout my career. Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin for example. Phoronix is another. Level1Tech replaced some of these for me but the long forms are harder to come by these days.
I wonder when text based media actually became unsustainable on Internet. And how publications somehow lasted until now, was there still someone funding them in hopes of them working out? Like whole timeframe when things went from somewhat sustainable to unsustainable.
My journey into building computers and networking were partly driven by Anandtech. I bought and sold quite a few things on the forums, too. I always thought Anandtech was one of the higher quality tech publications. RIP to one of the best.
I'm glad to hear the forums are still going to be around. They certainly aren't as popular as they once were but I still consider myself a part of that community and enjoy conversing with the old timers once and awhile.
I first came across AnandTech sometime in the fall of 2020 when covid lockdowns were still going strong and I was starting to get more interested in computer hardware. It seemed like a pretty decent site with good articles in a world full of crappy seo-optimized clickbait. I usually go there to read about new CPUs or CPU designs that have been released by AMD, ARM, etc. These days it feels like those aren't coming out as frequently as they did back then (not sure if this is true or if there's just more going on in my life these days) and as a result I haven't spent much time on their site lately.
I'll miss them, but for what it's worth they could probably be replaced by one guy with a decent substack. Or maybe that already exists, if anyone has any recommendations let me know.
I really don’t want to watch ad riddled reviews on YouTube. I always went to their site to read an actual article that goes into depth about tech and gave great reviews. Truly a sad day for the internet.
Sad day but I guess Anand moving to Apple made this more plausible. I’m going to miss the meticulously perf charts.
They do have some great talent, I hope they go on to do great tech journalism.
Agree. The most significant improvement in a long time has been has been SSDs. Was cool to have lived through a period where compute power was delivering real-world 2x performance every 18 months.
There just isn’t a need for legacy media anymore. Anyone can shitpost all day on X or Threads and reach an audience 10x that of AnandTech or any other traditional media outfit.
Haven't all the good review article sites disappeared at this point? DPReview springs to mind.
Anandtech was always reliable. It was Tom's Hardware when Tom's Hardware sold out (some 20 years ago). Many here may not even know that Tom's Hardware was originally a well-respected source of information. But I guess Tom's Hardware was a glimpse into the future, low-quality content litttered with affiliate-spam.
But there is a market for high-quality content still. I can't help but think that the article sites simply failed to adapt. Look at Linus's Tech Tips [1]. Yes, video production is expensive but the advertising revenue is also higher.
None of these sites seemed to have adapted to the world of short form video content (Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, IG Reels) in a way that feels fresh, organic and useful.
Reddit seems to be the last bastion of getting authentic information and even that is steadily getting astroturfed.
I'm confused, was he the only writer left? I know Anand doesn't run the site anymore, but is there really nobody to keep the site running with new articles?
> In-depth reporting isn’t always as sexy or as exciting as other avenues, but now, more than ever, it’s necessary to counter sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions.
Very true. But, in-depth reporting doesn't have to be not-sexy either. Considering the marked drop in audience attention spans in today's world along with the emergence of AI-driven knowledge sources, journalists will benefit a lot from just improving their presentation from long-form writing to something analogous to presentation slides with understandable visualizations.
I wonder how much of a difference our ad-blockers made to their revenue; I always liked AnandTech and now I'll feel guilty about leaving my blocker enabled.
The reader demographic is more likely to run adblockers because installing them is trivial to us - in the same way a reader of a cooking website discussing flour products can probably bake a cake with their eyes closed (I on the other hand would probably burn down the kitchen).
It ran great articles to the very end but it also had some series that were real stinkers.
The one that bugged me was the monthly roundup of HDDs where, usually, they recommended that you pay $100 extra to get an expensive consumer HDD that, according to the spec sheet, was 3db quieter and consumed maybe 0.5W less than an inexpensive enterprise HDD (funny reversal, but the enterprise product is a mass-produced product they sell a lot of and all the hyper-thin SKUs aimed at consumers probably sold one here and one there) although anything is one bad bearing away from being 20db louder.
This went in for years but they never confronted the issue directly by taking measurements or asking if the HDD industry was destroying itself by offering too many SKUs — if WD had just one SKU maybe Best Buy would stock it, but if there is a different one for a 2 bay NAS, a 3 bay NAS, a 4 bay NAS, and for recording video they won’t stock any of them. (And with all those spurious choices they didn’t give you a clear choice of CMR vs SMR!)
Charlie Demerjian stands almost alone as a tech journalist who doesn’t get high on the industry’s supply and, on that level, Anandtech was another tech outlet dependent on that industry that couldn’t give it the tough love to point out rampant brand destruction. Charlie told you 5 years ago that Intel’s product roadmap was a suicide note, Anandtech sure didn’t.
SemiAccurate has always been true to its name: occasional scoops but mixed with a lot of hyperbole, bluster, half truths and things that are just flat out wrong.
Back when I worked at a semiconductor company, reading any articles about us was always very funny because it always had more things wrong than right.
all good things come to an end - others do too but we won't remember them.
good run, and remember from the late 90s - later at my interview in Lehman Brothers, the hiring manager was looking at the site when I walked in and that was the small talk. RIP AnandTech
Sad to read this, but all things pass I guess. Spent a large chunk of my life posting on and reading the AT forum. Last I checked I still have a mod account. Things sort of started to go downhill for me with the sale to... meh can't even recall the purchaser it's been so long. Farewell AT, thanks for all the good advice on builds and overclocking through the years.
This is a very sad day. Along the way in my life and career I had a brief stint building custom computers for other people, and I spent quite a lot of time getting into overclocking for myself. Those journeys and my interest in computer hardware, performance, security, and how that impacted systems was heavily influenced by gaming and by the community that surrounded it. Most of the places I used to haunt are long gone, but through all that AnandTech was always around. It's the first place I go when I want to learn about a piece of hardware, and now it's gone.
I am happy at least that there are others trying to carry the torch. Gamer's Nexus, Chips and Cheese, and a few small blogs here and there are still trying to dig into the nitty gritty of computer hardware in a way that's not only approachable, but accurate, without all the marketing BS. It's unfortunate though that it's so hard to make something like this survive.
So much nostalgia from my teen and 20s, this site was not only entertaining but equally educational and always looked forward to reading the next review. I hadn't thought much of this website frankly in decades, but this is a bittersweet encounter, thank you for all the great memories and all the knowledges bestowed upon us.
Sometimes I wonder if my knowledge on hardware and software integration is largely because of I have been reading Anandtech ( and many other sources ) since late 90s.
It first stated as the journey of AMD CPU. Who wouldn't want the best bang for the bucks. And then Pentium II / III, SSE. Pentium 4, Itanium, AMD64. Pentium M, Core, and then the rise of SSD. In between that we also have many Video Card reviews, S3, Matrox, Voodoo, Nvidia, ATI, PowerVR, explanation of Playstation CELL processor. Creative Sound Blaster. I think by mid 2000 all those news were quite boring. Largely because most of the consumer decisions are settled. Until iPhone came around Anandtech was the first and perhaps still the only tech site that goes behind the scene and start looking not only the Apple technology but a educational guess behind the rationale why some of those product decisions were introduced. And only after a few years Anand himself got hired from Apple.
I also remember my first death threat on Anandtech Forums from Intel Fan Boys. That was before most tech people knew much about TSMC. There was a time when people think Intel is an undisputed king in technology and wont believe TSMC would take over.
Lot of memories. It is very unfortunate Anandtech is closing down. I just wish I am a multi billionaire and could buy it and keep it running even as a hobby. Somewhat fortunate is that we have Chips and Cheese, a relatively new site which fills a lot of what Anandtech used to do. Servethehome for Enterprise section.
Really Sad. I know some of current and ex-anandtech staff lurks on HN but dont post much. Farewell, Thank You and Good Luck to you all.
Yeah I don't think they ever mentioned anything before this. I suspect this was a slow decline over several years and many meetings where they realized they'd either have to "sell out" or shut doors - if it were a new sudden thing they probably would've asked for help or indicated a willingness to try and stay afloat. I can't really blame them.
> the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was - nor will it ever be again
This is very darkly ominous and of course it does not apply just to tech journalism.
Written communication, by real people, is not an optional luxury, its the best means to exchange dense, valuable, high quality information.
It feels as if the current digital "economy" is hell-bent to turn society into an illiterate, short-video watching, ad-clicking mob.
Not sure there has ever been technological innovation that was so regressive in its impact, profiting by actively degrading the human condition. Alas, here we are and we can't blame the Martians.
I would push back some. Humans have communicated orally long before writing and lectures / interviews / discussions remain highly effective.
After all, not everyone was in favor of the pulp that churned from mass-market printing presses.
However, I can certainly imagine a voice-enabled LLM trained on European History that students could learn a lot from. People have been printing books for 500+ years, but we’ve really only gotten into user-generated video within the past 10 years.
Throughout my childhood video was really quite time-consuming to produce. It largely still is. If we can continue get that friction down, then over time I expect we’ll se more and more valuable video content being produced.
OTOH, although not tech journalism, but consider the Substack success of The Free Press and some others. There might be some light at the end of this tunnel.
It’s not really a “current economy” thing or anything to do with technological innovation itself. As someone mentioned elsewhere, our economic model of line must go up quarterly forever is the real thing to fix here. Does turning society into an illiterate mob make sense long-term? Most would say no. Does it make sense short-term? Unfortunately it makes a lot of sense as long as you can get out with your cash hoard before everything burns. Companies are simply acting towards what we have been incentivizing for decades now.
cash is effectively claims against what other people can give you in the future.
An illiterate mob can only give you very few things of value. So, indeed, this is short-termism running society to the ground - as if there is no tomorrow.
A bit sad. But I haven't checked the site in 10+ years. It was hot in the heydays of the Internet and Pentium processors, reading reviews about CPU and motherboard performance really helped in deciding what to buy when a top of the line computer was already obsolete a year later.
Progress has essentially halted since 15+ years. Back then a new computer really coud do something the old one didn't even dreamt of. Now what can the new generation of CPU do? Watch YouTube shorts even shorter? :) Or the new Android or Apple phone? Send more pictures on WhatsApp? Literally don't see any difference between my current phone / computer compared to what I had 10 years ago. (I don't play games, maybe there it's visible somewhat).
Anyhow, it was nice while it lasted but all good things must come to an end ... Bye Anandtech, you will be remembered.
Knew them for most of their existence, though I never actually read them that often.
On the one hand a bittersweet end to a familiar editorial, on the other hand a deserved end to one of many "journalism" outlets. No, I don't have a good opinion of journalists.
> Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable.
I am not super familiar with AnandTech, but I question the idea that "tech journalism" is dead or dying. Marques Brownlee has almost 20 million subscribers on YouTube. Consumer Reports has 6 million members. Etc.
The difference, I think, is that media is shifting to video as the default, for better or worse. Looking at their YouTube channel, AnandTech only has about 20,000 subscribers, which looks like they never quite figured out how to transfer their content into video format.
Video was a mistake. Even high quality YouTube tech channels (like GamersNexus) work far better in a text format where you can compare benchmark results without running the video in mpv, taking dozens of screenshots, and then painstakingly comparing them. And that channel has a charismatic anchor, unlike many.
At least they have a website with the same material.
Have a look at rtings and try to come up with an idea how to make this work in a video format:
It doesn't really matter if it "was a mistake," because it's what the market is asking for. Cars were probably a mistake ecologically, vs. horses, but it's what we've got.
The article hints at this, with the following sentence: "Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again" (emphasis on the written).
Yeah, it's just weird to me that this entity with a big following and storied history isn't willing to adapt to the times, or even get a little creative and figure out how to do longform video combined with longform text.
I don't think Marques is a tech journalist. He is a consumer goods journalist.You wouldn't see videos about architecture of Zen processor and their impact from Marques. Not a criticism, different fields.
His content doesn't have the journalistic quality that feels like he is going out and digging for stories etc. The content is given to him by companies and he chooses to showcase what he is given.
There is not really anything wrong with that either but I don't expect any real scoops to come from his channel.
I agree, but so does the article; I quote:
"Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again."
Unlike a random blog, I can pay YouTube to remove all the ads. I watch GN videos, and they get paid, but I never see ads other than GN's sponsor message and merch which are trivial to skip.
Compare AnandTech which has always been a user-hostile visual insult. The whole article is covered in ads. You can barely find the words. The articles are needlessly split over 25 pages so you click and load over and over. They really pioneered a lot of bad patterns.
I'm more optimistic. Video may be clunky and largely difficult to search within now, but in the near future, with AI transcription and some kind of new UI, will become as easy to access as text is today.
A sad day. My buddy and I were the original developers of anandtech when it went live running on cold fusion and oracle as the backend. I started a hosting company and hosted anadtrch for a few years. Lots of memories there.
I remember religiously checking the hot deals forum then for insane dot com boom pricing choices (and errors). Fun times. A bunch of us moved to IRC but then Fatwallet sort of ruined things w their volume of users.
Where does that community exist now?
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It was super ahead of it's time with all the crazy functionality and connection.. flowed together really smoothly.
I think there's a need for this kind of thing still, if you have a passion for it you should consider reimagining what kind of content could be needed in 2024.
YC seems to like the kind of esoteric knowledge you probably have.
I retired from tech after 40 years this spring. Im now a farmer in the middle of nowhere.
The big thing i see missing from long ago times is a real sense of community and an all in one site ( article , forums etc). They try and some are decent but there just isnt the connection and i dont think that will ever return. I think reddit and the like sucked all that away from sites and the audience is much much broader so i feel they lose some of that “likemidedness” i dunno im just old and cant really relate to the younger “techies” of today.
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I don't care what anybody says, ColdFusion was a beautiful mess and fun to write.
Do you know Lucee?
https://www.lucee.org/
I agree. I did really well in my career with it
Wow! Out of curiosity, which year was it?
Yea we worked on his old site before anadtech. Sheesh so much fun at CES with the gang in lv. Was fun times. My buddy started fusetalk by writing anadtech forums from scratch. It all moved to .net after a couple years and that when i left. Jason stayed on for years
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I would guess somewhere around 1997 when Anand started the site.
Anandtech is how I learned what Ubuntu is. I must have been about 10 years old, and the concept of any OS besides Windows or MacOS was completely foreign to me. Within a few weeks, I had dug an old laptop out of my dad's bin of "stuff work wasn't using anymore" and I managed to put Ubuntu on it. I think it was an HP. I don't remember the exact specs but I do remember that the GPU was failing, there were weird video glitches all the time, and the battery held a charge for about 15 minutes.
That was my first experience with Linux. That broken-ass computer was what I used when I learned Arduino. I'm now a firmware engineer, writing this comment on my work laptop, which is running Ubuntu.
Makes me feel old. I was at uni when Ubuntu came out. But my story was similar to yours in the mid 90s and I got hold of a walnut creek cd with Slackware from some PC mag, a couple floppy disks and discarded hardware and I was off to the races
There was something about discovering tech through dedicated tech sites back then that felt exciting.
Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
I guess I am getting old
I got hooked with Yggdrasil on CD-RROM. The 20+ 3.5” floppies was too bulky for me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
Slackware!!! Dang, I had forgotten that name. That was the first distro I installed as well. Xeyes and stuff. Oh, dear...
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> Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
If you're getting old, then I must be too, because I know your pain. I don't remember the last time I saw new tech(1) that felt like a real novelty to me.
Now that I've been fully in "career mode" for a few years, I have the budget to engage in my hobbies with greater depth than ever before, and that's amazing. Yet, I've found myself going deeper and deeper into the "retro." Old computers, old cameras, old music formats, etc. It's easier to find novelty there.
(1): this is limited to tech. There's great new music that isn't too hard to come by if you can manage to train Spotify's algorithm to give it to you.
Yeah dang my first linux install was at about the same age but it was Red Hat (not RHEL or Fedora). I remember most of my time was spent trying to get my network drivers working properly.
Still the GPU barely works
There's an excellent podcast called Acquired with a 3-part episode covering the birth and evolution of NVIDIA, highly recommended.
That is not MY Fault.
PR welcome
Very sad, but Anandtech has been on a downslope since Anand left. Once that happened it seemed like they almost instantly went from publishing many times a week to only occasionally pushing out content, usually quite delayed. The quality was still very good though and I always tried to find an Anandtech review of whatever it was I was looking for. Did the publishers just cheap out and stop paying for enough articles? Or did people lose motivation when they found themselves working for a faceless corp instead of Anand?
I don't blame the site for this, though. Anand got out at about the same time as marketing overtook technological improvement in product development (for the most part). I remember the very early days (I lived just a couple miles from Anand in the Raleigh area) where he was doing super in-depth assessments at the board & chip level, through the rapidly changing evolution of motherboards, CPUs & GPUs in the early 2000s ... but as everything basically became mostly commoditized and user experience differences have reduced even for home-built PCs (and the number of people still home-building PCs, period!), there just hasn't been a compelling reason to continue this depth of analysis or writing for the past decade or so.
> marketing overtook technological improvement in product development
I would say another key change is things just becoming less modular over time.
Like, the chipset used to be a major factor in choosing your motherboard, but it just doesn't matter anymore. Third-party chipsets are no longer a thing, and there's little difference between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a full integrated northbridge now.
And honestly, today's PCs are powerful enough that there's no point in even bothering to make optimal choices. You could pick mediocre parts for all your stuff and still end up with a beast. It's not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you'd feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.
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> usually quite delayed.
I used to be a regular reader of AnandTech since the early 2000s and the delays are what drove me off the site. Specifically when the Nvidia GTX 1080 launched on May 27, 2016. The AnandTech review came out 2 months later on July 20, 2016. [1] I had no problem waiting a whole week, but after that it was getting ridiculous. They just didn't serve their readers.
After I found replacement reviewers, mostly on YouTube, for my in depth reviews, I never went back to regularly visiting AnandTech. Their time had already passed in 2016 as far as I'm concerned. Not only were they delayed, but their reviews weren't even the most in depth any more.
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[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-...
Agree, but when Ian left a few years ago is when I ultimately stopped visiting all together.
Maybe unavoidable, but the level of ads covering the website also made it borderline unreadable...
What ads? Seriously, though, when Anand and Ian left was about the time the content started losing quality, the ads started increasing, and I removed the site from my adblocker's whitelist.
Around the year 2000 (don't remember exactly) there were 3 sites I checked daily: Anandtech, Tom's Hardware and XBit Labs. Since Anand and Thomas sold their sites the quality dropped enough that in the past few years I rarely opened any of these sites (except Xbitlabs that does not exist for a long time). In some way, Anand and Thomas were the souls that left the bodies.
Yeah, I also noted that. In 2014 Anandtech was acquired by the same company that ran Tomshardware, the two sites were among the most popular in their segment. I never shook off the feeling that after the acquisition it was left to die.
A testament to the quality of Anandtech is that in 2011 I started a job at Micron on their SSD team and the first thing they said was to go read some articles on anandtech about how SSDs work. They covered slc vs mlc, trim, etc in better detail and in a more approachable way than anything else.
I've leaned on Anandtech ever since as a go-to source for understand technical innovation in hardware. Thanks for making everything that much easier to understand.
I learnt about intel processors on Anandtech. Everything from how the L1, L2 & L3 caches work during the time of Nehalem, Haswell, Ivybridge, Sandy bridge... the ticks and the tocks. 3D Nand, flash storage and a whole bunch of other things explained there.
Someone needs to convince newmaxx to start a SSD review site.
Yes I remember reading one of those SSD articles about mlcs and it was so well written, quality knowledge captured on the internet. I hope someone starts up another anandtech like website
Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks, and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain segment of it.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)
From TFA:
> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
[0] https://ladybird.org/
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EDIT: fixed grammar.
> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
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I never believed that internet advertising was worth what it supposedly is. Stuff like this seems to confirm it for me: https://www.adexchanger.com/on-tv-and-video/googles-second-w...
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
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People would pay for far more if charged a nominal markup over what their readership is considered worth when subsidized by ads.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
* Next Issue aka Texture. I was a subscriber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)
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I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV bundle model that sucked.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
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I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
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++++++ to Kagi.
>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available.
Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
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The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
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I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
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> I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
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HN user offers to pay $1.99/year for many carefully done review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
Chips and Cheese is Anandtech's spiritual successor and I think its patron model is probably better overall.
https://chipsandcheese.com/
David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.
https://www.realworldtech.com/
but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work?
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the quality of AnandTech can't figure out a viable business model.
I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations.
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
They should start a Substack
Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports.
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
> And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
> Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait?
Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
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Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
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Anantech was the high watermark in tech journalism and the only place I'd go to look at in-depth (sometimes beyond belief) reviews of Apple hardware test results not found anywhere else on the web. Page after page after page of detailed tests and results.
Hard to imagine that type of content being lucrative from a display-ad point of view if they used traditional ad networks, but the effort was absolutely appreciated and respected by readers.
A sad day but considering how the online ad market has tried to force publishers to focus on video content an understandable one for printed-word journalists. It's awful.
This is true, and I second your sadness. They always had those 1/2/3 pages more than competitors about architecture details at the start of every review.
But apparently right now it pays more to do a cheap video review on YouTube with fake benchmarks, you get the hundred thousands video views, sell the hardware and call it a day.
Reviews for components are better in written form than video form, yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using. I guess it doesn't help that it feels like there hasn't been an increase in performance to price ratio for GPU's in the longest time.
I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing, but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my way to what I'm looking for very quickly.
I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.
Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared to text. I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster than an equivalent video, they aren't even in the same ballpark. It boggles my mind that so many people prefer videos, given how much slower they are. It's enough to make me cynically wonder if people these days are illiterate or something.
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Google has been trialing AI overviews of youtube videos, essentially it opens a gemini chat where gemini has been prompt-stuffed with the whole video.
A 12 minute "Here is my favorite method for unclogging a drain" video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini telling you what it is.
I don't know how google is gonna get this past creators if they fully role it out, as it is a massive shameless backstab, but at the same time it is wonderful for viewers who don't want to trudge through filler video after clickbait headlines.
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I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.
I didn't realize how bad this has gotten until I was looking for a GPU undervolting guide
What could be a couple of paragraphs is stretched into a 5-10 minute video; most of which is explaining what it is, and not how to do it
> terrible at video scrubbing
It is partly the form, video, but more so the access method, the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through because the file isn't cached and takes a few milliseconds to several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface also doesn't help because usually they lack controls for skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and backwards.
yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text in ~30 seconds.
> I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing
Do not worry: in a very short while we'll all have AI tools, running locally, that can summarize videos in textual forms in a split second.
Prompt: "Summarize this vid in five paragraphs. List specs."
It already exists. In a short while we'll all have this at home.
P.S: prompt: "Remove every single ad and submarine content too".
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Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no matter where you look there are things to distract you.
yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.
There must be a market for video information converted to text. It would be completely illegal, of course.
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Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn't it?
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I never understand the obsession with video. It's the first thing my kids reach for when searching for information about something and it's always painfully slow and inefficient.
Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?
I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume.
I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.
I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way.
In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.
If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do it compared to see they literally just presented the video script in article form and you could choose the graphs and time that matters to you.
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Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z) that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like how to download VSCode.
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Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren't giving the advantages they once used to.
You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a decade long head start and billions more invested in development.
We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment remains competitive with brand new products in terms of performance.
ARM has gotten very good, and is definitely competitive with mid-range x86 while offering better performance-per-watt, but it is still not competitive with high-end x86.
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> You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance
Concerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance: dream on ... :-(
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What do die shrinks have to do with ISA performance? Also, there are no RISC-V CPUs available that match the latest X86 or ARM CPUs. Even then, the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).
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Yeah I keep looking into upgrading my 12 year old PC, but for like £1500 I can get one 10x faster (multithreaded) and only about 4x faster single core. I mean, that's a decent boost but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.
That might've been a result of Intel having the best leading-edge fabs until 2018 or so. It was hard to judge different ISAs before then.
Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video & merch money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site: https://gamersnexus.net/
It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done
The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.
> yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using
Doesn't help that Google search results spam videos they make money from in a carousel at the top of almost every query.
DC Rainmaker (sports gadgets reviews) has a nice compromise of having product video reviews on Youtube, but also even more in-depth reviews with all the tables and charts on his website. I used to read his written reviews, now I mostly skim his videos.
The ridiculously high prices of GPUs have really taken the fun out of hardware for me. I used to follow hardware developments closely, but now I upgrade much less often so that also stopped.
I agree but it's a little deceptive. For example I have a 4070 right now and I paid $600 for it. That's good money but it is more than likely far more than most people actually need.
If you watch or read reviews, you'd think only people in poverty use 4070s. I play competitive games and everything else I want to do with this card without issues and even with gas left in the tank.
They crank up settings in reviews to ultra settings and then try to make it look like if you don't have a $1200 GPU that you have trash. Reality is that these GPUs are overkill and in many games medium settings look nearly identical to ultra. I swear GPU manufacturers pay to have ultra settings available, with their nearly imperceptible improvements. The option is mostly there as far as I can tell, simply to upsell GPUs.
First it was written reviews, then it was youtube videos, soon it will be short fast paced TikTok clips.
Also, I never saw half an ad on anandtech, or never noticed..
Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.
The comments about "AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting" are interesting.
Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you're doing these things.
Which I suspect ties back to things like Google (and others) neglecting the quality of organic search, pushing it down the page, etc. Or competing with quality content by exposing it in snippets and AI summaries with only subtle ways to get to the actual article.
I suppose, if that's the case, those practices eventually eat their own tail. No new Anandtech content to ignore or copy now, for example.
> Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you're doing these things.
Yup. However, I can't find a confirmation anywhere in TFA. Just some hints here and there. So I wonder, what finally made them quit?
It sounds like Future Brand, the owner of both AnandTech and Tom's Hardware wanted to consolidate.
> Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you're doing these things.
If you're on an advertising model, yes, impossible even.
If you're on a patronage/subscription model, totally doable nowadays.
There is an alternative history where Google and FB et al. didn’t eat up all the advertising revenue that used to sustain good journalism.
It might be impossible to have independent journalism with the internet as it currently is.
I don’t know what the alternative is, but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month. This might have trained internet folks to go to the news websites for news and kept the economics propped up a bit better than the disaster it currently is.
My guess is that this would be even worse for news sites as it would lower their overall traffic. Certainly seems to be the case in Canada. I don’t get the sense that search engines/fb/etc are the problem. Rather it’s 1) loss of classified ads and 2) competition from all the free content provided in blogs, posts, tweets and so on. Why pay to read an uninformed opinion piece when you can get it for free scrolling through your X feed?
Absolutely. As someone who spent about 5 years working in local news a bit over a decade ago, it wasn't the search engines or Facebook that killed us, it was craigslist. Especially business classifieds, while not individually big $$$, they added up. We had some edge in content quality for a while, but the classifieds drying up led to deep cuts in the newsroom, and then there was nothing separating us from the local TV stations who also had superficial coverage, but got it out much quicker.
To get a full picture of what happened to journalism, we can't just blame Google and Facebook, we have to acknowledge all the years people stopped going to websites and only got their news on Google and Facebook. Those companies gave people what they said they wanted, or what they didn't outright say they wanted but silently expressed through their actions. Neither party cared that what they were doing was bad for the health of the web (to say nothing of journalism or the culture). If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.
I guess fundamentally I agree with this, but the user experience on most online publications is, and has been, wow, for more than two decades, I think, so bad that every time I'm forced to experience it, I can't even get through a single article before I get so repulsed in worst cases I get an actual negative physical reaction. And it's getting worse as time goes by.
I get that online publications have to advertise, but to do it with auto-play video w/ audio of unrelated content, animated/video ads, ads for items you already bought a month ago, the outright scam ads, SEO garbage ("this one trick to get a supermodel girlfriend"), superstitials blocking content, dark pattern ads (e.g. x icon opens a link rather than closes the ad), ads that move and hover on the page when you scroll down.
I could go on for longer, but I'm getting that same negative physical reaction by simply describing this crap.
Another version of this discussion that comes up frequently is something like the "Support local businesses!" thing, where we're supposed to spend more money at the local diner and ignore a chain like Denny's.. but Denny's is open 24 hours. And people should use Mom+Pop's furniture store, even though they can get a better price plus light bulbs, and the rest of the groceries from Walmart. And we need to use less water during my showers, and ignore the golf courses or the chip factory down the road.
The idea of being a "responsible consumer" at most just delays the inevitable shutdown for a few years, because economies of scale is a real thing. Moralizing to people that they need to spend more money / time / convenience / change their habits isn't effective, because even if consumers are genuinely interested in making sacrifices in exchange for quality, everything that's independent is closing anyway when the small owners sell out to whoever is buying. Those who thrive on mergers and acquisition don't care whether consumers are "responsible".
Consumers aren't children or robots, but we also don't have any choice or agency.. in the US at least there are 4-5 companies that make 80% of the groceries you buy. Telecommunications and media are going to look even worse, depending on how you want to measure it. As much as I hate to say it, it looks like only big government can protect us from big business. So yes, blaming big tech is missing the point, but so is blaming consumers. Write your congressman I guess? Wish I could write his economist instead though.. for whatever reason discouraging monopolies doesn't seem to work, so maybe we should look instead at deliberately incentivizing variety.
The "professional" journalists were all to happy to load their sites with chum boxes and native ads disguised as articles. The search aggregators don't expose that crap.
> If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.
This is a remarkably-astute comment. The problem is that it is very difficult for people to be aware, in any given moment, that a seemingly-innocuous action they're taking now will have devastating consequences in a decade or a century or more. This is made more difficult by well-heeled commercial interests which are highly motivated to discourage such insight. Ultimately, one of the roles of government, and it seems strange to say this, is to develop laws which paternalistically protect people from themselves. As an example of this, see privacy/data protection legislation for the internet, e.g. GDPR. As a counter example, see any country which very deliberately avoids developing privacy legislation for the internet.
> what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month
News sites would probably change whatever metadata Google is using to check site age to make their news articles appear one-day-more-than-month old to Google crawlers, all as a part of Search Engine Optimization techniques.
There is a trivial solution to this. Store your own copy (or hash, or whatever) of the article and don't rank it until your copy is at least a month old.
The idea is still nonesense because some other search engine will show up without this restriction, and any news site would prefer to be listed there, rather than not.
I dont believe your perception is accurate. I worked for Knight Ridder during this time, and print news was already a walking corpse. Cable/satellite news channels, and broadcast tv, and even radio before that had worn away the primacy of print. By the 2000s circulation had been dropping for decades. Local/regional newspapers were surviving on classifieds and local ad buys, which was eaten up by craigslist and ad exchanges generally.
At that point, 2000ish, there wasnt much newspaper journalism left to be sustained. Most US print news was gannett and knight ridder recycling AP/reuters wire stories. A handful of national/global mastheads could sustain real investigative reporters and foreign bureaus, for a little while.
Personally I dont see how (quality) “free to read” news persists. Quality and depth is the differentiation, and the consumer needs to pay for it. Id bet more on the bloomberg/the economist/stratfor models continuing in to the future.
Display ads / Google create lots of problems, but news used to be mostly funded by classified ads (and print subscriptions).
Craigslist basically killed that entire subindustry by giving the service away for free.
Right. That's an interesting though exercise. We ended up with "dumbed down" summary news.
Ian Cutress (TechTechPotato) made an emotional goodbye video this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY
Tangent: Interesting coincidence that this is ten years to the day of Ryan Smith's tenure.
Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of obsessively in-depth coverage. Ian Cutress has been doing his thing as well, but erred mostly on the side of being a philosopher rather than an investigator. Interested to see where all the people end up. Clearly the demand for good info hasn't vanished.
> Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of obsessively in-depth coverage.
Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
It's sad how much information is moving to a much slower and data-intensive medium. The same is happening in lots of other areas as well, like game development. Articles always been easier for me to consume, but more and more valuable information is moving into videos these days that it's hard to avoid even though I prefer other mediums...
> Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
I recall them talking about how they prefer writing articles, especially given how info-dumpy their content tends to be, but videos are what actually pays the bills.
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http://gamersnexus.net/
They do post their video scripts as articles with the relevant screenshots. It’s not quite the same as a text-first article, but I prefer reading.
Completely agree. I am listening to some chill music and wanting to catch up on some hardware reviews, so I want to read a nice article. If I accidentally click on something that takes me to a god awful yt video, it completely disrupts my focus and irritates the hell out me. I instantly close the tab and never go back to whatever source pointed me there. I absolutely loathe yt video content of stuff that should obviously be text but isn't. Gaming content has gone this way a lot sadly.
Nobody pays for words, but YouTube pays for videos. Sad but true.
This reminds me of how shocked I was when memes using image macros started becoming a thing around 2008 or so. I still remembered the bad old days of dial up and waiting tens of seconds for images to load and thought it was so horridly inefficient to convey a message that way.
Now we have HD videos pushing the same (and arguably worse) content taking tens if not hundreds of MBs and conveying the same information that is much harder to parse than a text file could do in a few kilobytes.
I feel like I am having my old man yells at cloud moment here, but its a hugely inferior medium.
I feel like the "Cable TV-ification" applies to them, some of the videos are very much sensationalism. The host also comes off as a bit too full of themselves
That's what I thought as well, but then I saw their competition. Their ratio of bragging vs doing their homework is actually top notch.
Gamers Nexus is not very technical though, they probably don't understand how a CPU works.
Guess you've never watched one of their failure analysis videos then, or really any of them if that's your comment.
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That's so sad. Farewell and thanks for everything!
For me, the beginning of the end was when Anand and Brian Klug both moved to Apple. While I bet that they're doing great things there, I've been significantly less fascinated by new hardware, and in particular Apple hardware, ever since.
Shiny exteriors and magical features might appeal to many, but to me, somebody explaining in all detail what makes it work doesn't take anything away from the magic – quite the opposite.
This times 1000. I loved their deeply technical reviews and articles. I got hooked early on their CPU and GPU deep dives and their mobile deep dives in the 2010s.
I've been reading them since before my teenage years and they got me interested in the insides of tech enough for me to pursue and gain my degree in Computer Engineering. It definitely changed when Anand and Brian left, but end of an era now that the site is shutting down.
What a strange take on Apple hardware.
Apple is doing amazing things with Apple silicon.
Of course they're doing great things, but my point is that they're trying hard to keep it a secret how they're doing them. Compare what Apple is revealing about their chips with what Intel used to present back when they were the market leader, for example.
Anandtech was great at exploring these secrets and presenting their findings in a great way. That's what I miss.
> Finally, for everyone who still needs their technical writing fix, our formidable opposition of the last 27 years and fellow Future brand, Tom’s Hardware, is continuing to cover the world of technology.
I thought Tom’s Hardware was very consumer oriented, and didn’t go into nearly as much detail the way AnandTech did.
I think Chips and Cheese is the real successor, but they are a small group with less throughput.
They're afaik owned by the same company, so it makes sense to point people there.
https://www.servethehome.com/ has been scaling up their reporting as of late.
Some of their reviews are either weird or questionable. I read them quite regularly, but I no longer trust most of what they say.
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What about Ars Technica? It used to be pretty in-depth. Not sure about lately.
> And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely.
This is often not how these things go, and Future PLC deserves credit for good citizenship.
I agree. Archivists shouldn't hold their breath, anyway.
I am already mirroring the entire site lol
Prudent!
Wow. What a run, though. This is a hard business. I know, I ran a similar thing that was ever so briefly popular in the late 90s. I kept at it for a couple of years and maybe had a couple of reviews and articles get significant traffic over that span. I let it drop when I graduated high school - college was definitely the better bet for me haha. Back then I wished I could do it as well as Anand did. And they did it for almost 3 decades. If any of you happen to see this, I’m sad to see AnandTech end, but what you started had an amazing almost 3 decade run and you should be proud. I’m proud of you - AT is the best.
Interesting, it was literally exactly 10 years ago Anand announced his exit.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8456/the-road-ahead
> Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content
That’s the core of it. And too bad they’re off. Finding a news outlet that isn’t “tweeting” an article and isn’t a blog post on HN was great. And while they mention Tom’s hardware. It always felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.
Fair well.
Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means. Weird that I come across it so often, but never stopped to think what it means. :)
Also consider Goodbye, God be with ye. [0]
Adiós - A diós - go to god. [1]
[0] https://www.thetabernaclechoir.org/articles/goodbye-is-short...
[1] https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/145252/origins-of-adis
> Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means.
Fare is unrelated to fair:
> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) + well.*
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare
So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in life?)".
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You just gave me jamais vu.
Tom's Hardware has been biased towards intel(reg the recent 13th,14th gen over-voltage issues), Anand Tech seemed quite reliable in comparision.
I remember waaaaay back in the day when Tom’s Hardware was mocked as Tom’s Hotware because they did some testing of what would happen to AMD and Intel CPUs if the heat sink spontaneously fell off while they were running. I think at the time, the AMD CPU melted itself, which Tom’s Hardware criticized. It did seem back then that there was a subtle anti-AMD bias on the site, but I haven’t paid close attention to it over time. It’s interesting to hear that the accusations of Intel bias still exist!
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“We dont play silly cheap web traffic games” [proceeds to pointlessly split every article across 10 pages]
I don't know your age but rest assured that when Anandtech started, and for the following 7-8 years, doing that was absolutely needed for a good user experience. Try loading a giant single page with dozens of images on a 28.8kbaud connection... It will not end well
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The print version concatenated all the pages. They did it to allow users to not load all the charts all at once.
farewell*
fare thee well*
Google captured the web with their search product. Then they monopolised it with Adsense.
And absolutely did not optimize for returning quality information.
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No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.
In what sense did they monopolise the web with adsense?
I never thought I would pay for searching information; yet now that I do, it's decidedly not google exactly because of this. Adsense hot garbage.
I was really surprised they survived this long. Long, overly elaborate, badly structured, too technical, and hence boring for the average joe, kinda articles all around.
Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible website structure that is forced on every news outlet they own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.
The whole point of some of their articles was to go into the more esoteric technical details rather than gloss over them like some other sites. So in that aspect you are correct: it wasn’t for “the average joe”. However, for some people it was what they wanted.
That attention to technical detail and knowledge is why people like Der8auer have an audience today and people respect his opinion.
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For those of us with an attention span, long investigative reading is enjoyable and the knowledge gained is beneficial
I'm surprised people today even learn to read. Just watch youtube.
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Anandtech was the best place to get the full rundown of processors. Its really sad to hear its closing. Its going to be a huge loss to everyone.
Once upon a time Real World Technology was even better, but met the same fate. If you can write these sorts of reviews you can make much more money as a consultant than from a website.
Happily the RWT forum remains up and active. It's an absolute goldmine for deep discussions on processors.
Loved their MacBook reviews. And then eventually quit doing them.
Holy smokes. End of an era.
I was around when the ghz wars were happening. I remember reading SharkyExtreme, hothardware, 2CPU.com, hardocp, anandtech and others for their reviews.
Sad. Very sad. I almost wish they had not decided to close up shop. Instead spin out and go sub only.
Don't forget the leading light for most of that time, TechReport. It absolutely breaks my heart to see what happened to that site...
Oh man! Techreport was amazing back in the day. Now it’s unrecognizable.
Peak PC.
This may not be a popular opinion, but this news reminds me how much I miss the Block-era Engadget, and even the old Gizmodo. Both have woven politics in so deeply and the writing at times so clearly uninformed that they are not enjoyable.
I was genuinely curious what type of politics a tech website like Gizmodo would get into. Then I saw they have a "politics" section, with 9 out of the 20 first articles with "Trump" in the headline. Now I understand.
At this point I’m more surprised when someone doesn’t find a way to work politics into whatever they are saying. We are well past the point when a site needed to have some plausible connection to politics to justify including it.
The number of random Kamala blow job innuendo comments I’ve seen posted in completely unrelated topics in the last few jobs is disheartening.
How to say enough? Thank you thank you thank you
CPU Microarchitecture analysis was the best, after Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes retired from his site: Anand and Brian Klug and Ian Cutress; I'm certain I've overlooked a few stellar tech analysts.
Especially during the era when Intel was trying to wedge x86 into mobile and even wearable devices.
Of late, the site has been posting the occasional deep-dive hardware review (notably, PC power supplies by E. Fylladitakis) and industry breaking news (Ganesh, Anton Shilov), but it's all moved to Tom's Hardware.
This makes me incredibly sad. Nothing lasts forever, but AT has been a part of my life since it launched, when I was a teen obsessed with computers. I didn't feel so sad when Slashdot or The Inquirer declined, maybe because they were in decline over a long period. But AT was special, they only declined in review frequency, not quality.
Quality journalism struggles to turn a profit. Soon we will only have a grey goo web, created by LLMs endlessly recycling each other's output in a race to the bottom. Sad face.
There was time I read Tom's Hardware and thought that was the top of tech journalism and reviews,until the (i don't remember when) a revamp to the site that focused more on news. Then I found anandtech, reading all in depth article from the marketing material down to architecture level. It was very eye opening, the quality and depth is even on higher level. I was sad when Ian left, but now it's the ultimate sadness.
Tom's Hardware took a nosedive when Thomas Pabst left.
Selling it to have time with his kids (IIRC) was a fantastic choice, but I miss his version of it for sure.
There was a time in early 2000's when both sites were great and very competitive. I was reading both to see what opinions they have about products they both reviewed. Quality was very good on both sites, it changed later.
Man this is sad … I think I’ve been visiting this site for its entire lifetime. AnandTech has always been the best place for unbiased, deeply technical looks at hardware and it will be greatly missed
So many good sites gone, or unrecognizable due to clickbait or outrage news. In particular:
Anandtech Tech Report HardOCP Ars Technica (Eric Berger is the lone holdout here) Slashdot
the list goes on. I'm glad at least that Anand went out as he went in. Thanks for all the years, Anand!
Where to go now?
Chips and Cheese https://chipsandcheese.com/
Serve the Home https://www.servethehome.com/
Tom's Hardware https://www.tomshardware.com/
I was going to say ArsTechinica which I have fond memories of from many years ago, but I just took a look and I don’t even recognize it - looks more like engadget. So, no, not recommending.
Ars Technica is more of a general tech and science news site. They do some computer hardware and phone reviews, but nowhere near what a dedicated tech site does, and they're often not Day 1 reviews.
I find their content generally pretty high quality for their niche (with Beth Mole's and Eric Berger's content being my personal standouts), but Ars Technica is by no means a substitute for a site like AnandTech.
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Any other sites folks would recommend? It doesn't look to me like the sites mentioned have the same mix of stories as Anand would have covered. I'd like something that's really in the same vein.
Tom's - not the same quality it used to be.
Serve the Home - some articles only. Others are bad.
C & C - no comment, not enough experience with them.
Occasionally:
LTT (Linus Tech Tips), very commercial
Hardware Unboxing
Gamer's Nexus
JayzTwoCents
der8auer
No not Tom’s Hardware. That site is basically UGC now and is hot garbage.
UGC == user-generated content.
Anandtech was one of my earliest sources of highly quality tech reporting. In particular their reliance on data and testing always stood out. Many hours were spent there during my formative years. And, while I did stop reading it regularly at University, it had already played an important part in informing, and so shaping me.
Thanks, and farewell!
It would be extremely interesting to understand the detail of why anandtech can't function any more. Is it just too low-paid for core contributors, who could get more elsewhere? Is it the cost of running servers? What're the things that cause a web-based company like this to (seemingly) abruptly stop?
Just wanted to say that I remember joining the Anandtech forums in middle school in the early 2000's and was quite active for a number of years.
Reading articles and discussions there was my first experience getting into tech and helped my build my first computer.
I hope the editor and writers of Anandtech know the impact they had!
HN might as well put up a black ribbon for this news.
Ahhh this is so sad. So many of my favorite online spots are ending recently.
On a brighter note, Chips and Cheese are continuing the effort of quality technical journalism.
The quality of their content, back when they still produced any, was top. It always felt to me that the life departed with Ian. Ian's substack fills the place for me that AnandTech used to.
Kudos from my 2003 self, when Anandtech helped me build my first PC for university.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1094
Uni had fiber to the dorm room, so I was interested in maximizing available bandwidth through the rest of the system. Which in P4 / PCI days wasn't trivial!
Ironically enough, I still have that motherboard downstairs in a backup system, humming away... with a Pentium M via adapter. :)
Couldn't bring myself to put it out to pasture, and thought it was an interesting inflection point as "the last of the Netburst" era.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite uni classes was on microprocessor design, taught by someone who apparently taught Anand at NC (Tom Conte).
RIP. But better to call it quits when they're playing the send-off music.
As far as Anandtech's published article history that has to be kept online or else so much Wikipedia content will lose the Anandtech article references that are used heavily there and in other places online!
So the status of that content needs to be discussed and how that can be preserved!
For anyone here working or in contact with the people at Future: the post mentions that the forums are still going to be open, but will there be any active work on it?
I keep thinking that these specialized forums that lost space to Reddit could be revived if were integrated with ActivityPub.
Good opportunity to make the best of the forums. I would prefer traditional forums for community building over anything else.
> And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely.
THANK YOU!
Ⓧ Doubt
I remember reading their review for the Core 2 Duo E7500, which was my first foray into PCMR back in 2009 along with a GTX 260. FSB multipliers were fun!
Quite sad, we lost two of the greatest tech journalism of yesteryears, Game Informer and now Anandtech. Maximum PC barely hung on and later were boughtout by PCgamer.
I doubt anything will replace the in-depth tech journalism of Anandtech without visible paid biases and manipulation by big tech. I think Video centric media tech houses will rule the roost like Linus Media, GamerNexus and HuB.
Hoping Igors lab, chips&cheese and der8auer to carry the baton forward. I will kiss an old LGA 775 processor in their honor, rest in circuits.
I will really miss this site. They did incredible deep reviews of tech.
But once Anand left, the site started dying. They posted 1 review a month, and didn't even cover the iphone or galaxy or pixel launches. How on earth was that meant to survive?
It's shocking to realize I've been reading AnandTech's insightful and profound analysis for over two decades. The tech landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation in that time, yet AnandTech remained a steadfast and reliable source of information. They inspired countless hardware enthusiasts and reviewers, myself included, with many of us pursuing performance analysis as a career path. Their absence will be deeply felt, and it's truly a sad day for the tech community.
This makes me so sad. AnandTech was the leading, consistently reliable source of technical information and opinion that informed my views on so many products. And it was immensely fun to read. Its departure leaves a sore gap in my technology assessment toolkit, and a heaviness in my heart.
I hope tomorrow's enthusiasts take up the torch of deep technical reporting and fight back against all the shallow, clickbait reporting out there.
For me, Anandtech often scratched the itch that once upon a time was satisfied by Byte, 2600, and some of the trade magazines. Sad day.
One thing I can take from this is that even when you are not necessarily building all that cool/complex tech yourself, whatever else you are good at, take a good hard look at it. What ever is important to you, you can always apply what you are good at to some facet of what you admire and find value. Anandtech folks learned a lot about cool tech standing on the shoulders of giants, but they added value by teaching us what is really significant to look for and then benchmarking the hell out of it.
Distilling what you like about a thing and then build it (and don't forget that finding someone to pay you to do it is essential too) is key. Intellectual honesty is key in this process: You have to be honest about what you like about the Acquisition, Assimilation, and Dissemination of your ideas and product. They did that so well.
I always thought that whatever I wanted to build, it has something complex(and hence cool), but it could instead just what I want and have it be cool anyway.
I've been reading Anandtech for over a decade. Sad to see it go.
Same. It's so hard to stand out with a tech review site when there are dozens of other great ones, but this one truly did for me.
Real Shame. Does make me think what kind of business model is needed for this type of publication to survive and thrive? There must be a way ... I would really hope. Would be very curious at to the conversations that happened at Future PLC prior to shutting this asset down. Couldn't find much on companies fillings.
Yeah- I am personally struggling to understand how a website could be successful in 1997 run out of an apartment, but now that the PC and tech industry is many times bigger these sites can't make a go of it. And the headwinds Anand and Ars etc faced... I remember back in the 90s they wouldn't let them into Computex and CES.
Interestingly it was just last week that I was looking into building a NAS (Synology is leaning in hard on enshitification lately) and its suprisingly feasible, and I was wondering why no one talks about motherboards anymore, only CPUs/GPUs, and occasionally disks (spinning rust or solid state)- I thought I might have just been mentally ignoring those articles, but they really don't exist anymore. Ars/Anand/Toms had reviews for models once every 6 months or so.
Into the graveyard you go with, Aces Hardware, Sharky Extreme, Thresh's Firingsquad, and I am sure I am forgetting others that I used to load up every day but just don't exist anymore.
I'm sad to hear that they're shutting down. I thought that Anandtech would be one of the holdouts for written tech journalism in a world that's become increasingly video first.
What are people reading these days for hardware reviews?
I find that Notebookcheck and GSMArena are decent for laptop and phone reviews respectively.
A very sad, but not unexpected, end to another important source of quality journalism. Outcompeted, no doubt, by the noise & churn of the attention economy.
I hope they open source their benchmarking procedures. It’s valuable to see the results of comparable testing across multiple generations of hardware.
Those OS X reviews will go down in the history books of tech journalism.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/
Breaks my heart. Grew up reading AnandTech in the early 2010s for all things hardware -- processor releases, updates to the DDR SDRAM standard, motherboard and NAND flash reviews.
The era of unbiased, objective and deeply technical journalism is dying out. Sad.
> now, more than ever, it’s necessary to counter sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions. To quote Anand: “I don't believe the web needs to be academic reporting or sensationalist garbage - as long as there's a balance, I'm happy.”
A postscript deep dive article for AnandTech could look at the audience and business metrics of an ad-funded tech review site in 2024, in the context of competition from substack, Discord/Patreon, YouTube, neo-cable-tv, and other channels.
Does Algolia have enough data for a graph of AnandTech article discussions on HN, e.g. submissions and comments?
AnandTech was one of the websites that helped me as a child. I found it around 2002, and the clear-headed manner in which it discussed chip fabrication, function, lithography and the associated engineering and scientific foundations of them - as well as general concepts of bios, motherboard, chipsets, slots, bandwidth etc - helped foster a curiosity and familiarity with electronic hardware that has served me well for my whole life.
It helped me dream larger than my surroundings; which in turn helped me get out of an unstable home, poverty, and a dead-end town. I was sad when [H]ardOCP went down, but this hits different.
I bought my first AMD Processor after reading review of it on their website in 2002.
Thanks to an in-depth Anandtech review way back in 2011, I purchased a super cheap Dell Vostro laptop with a staggering 8 hours of battery life, pretty much unheard of for Windows laptops at the time. Plenty of OEMs would straight up lie, but AT's battery tests provided the proof consumers needed.
It's sad to see the state of 'tech journalism' in the Youtube age when it comes to hardware products. I feel like I'm watching a 20-minute lifestyle commercial rather than an actual nuts-and-bolts review. I guess that's what gets views and affiliate link revenue now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY
Dr. Ian Cutress did a video of his thoughts. (Just a subscriber of his channel)
This is really tragic. I understand the pressures that Anandtech is under, and of course they've just been doing it for so long that I have to think Ryan and team are burnt out, but what a bummer! AFAIK Anandtech is unique at least in the English-language internet. It's going to leave a huge hole.
I'm glad the forums continue and hope they thrive. Those forums are where I started my tech support journey 20+ years ago. It'll be interesting to see if Toms can fill in some of the more in-depth, technical and objective reporting.
I feel so nostalgic when these old places close up shop. I remember visiting AnandTech in the late 90s when I was still struggling to install Linux. Back when brick and mortar software stores were still a thing, staffed by like minded nerds who were happy to guide a young one and share knowledge.
I can't think of many other sites that have been around this long. https://www.bluesnews.com/ for gaming news comes to mind. It's been going since 96.
The Register. But it’s also not a good as it used to be.
I think the underrated aspect of the downfall is just how much tech was for the lack of a better word commoditized. I used to be the target audience, but even I don't really care that much anymore about all the details -- my last PC was built over 10 years ago, and when my laptop dies I will again buy a laptop that is the best combination of performance and hassle free. And the new generation that still cared never peeked beyond YouTube, which is definitely true.
It's actually crazy how fast new media became old media.
I'm glad to hear the website will stay up, for now.
This makes me wonder if there's a way to preserve websites indefinitely in ebook form. A small device that contains the entire history of a website, and is self-contained in the ebook. The device would obviously require power and the hardware could degrade, but this could be mitigated by making the hardware replaceable, or rather the content swappable across devices.
It seems like a middle ground between durability/portability (printed book) and usability/access (website).
those reading this that have the means -- consider a recurrent donation to archive.org
Or, you know, a computer file you could download and view on your computer.
Sad to read this, AnandTech has been one of the good and respectable sites all these decades. Old-timers (like myself) will for sure miss their reviews. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
Last week while looking into the Apple DMP exploit paper [1], I noticed that the researchers were inspired by this [2] anandtech article.
Y'all will be missed.
[1] https://www.prefetchers.info/ [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
So sad. I even create a userscript to reformat your website to read articles there. This is a screenshot of that format https://github.com/dxxvi/node-express-example/blob/master/Sc...
Those who wish the web to return to its hobbyist roots where nobody gets paid to write content online any more are starting to get their wish.
That wish didn't involve a world where search engines were intentionally tweaking their algos to serve up low-effort blogspam with zero individuality, burying actual hobbyist websites.
The impression I've got from said people here on HN is that search engines are disgusting ad powered horrors and therefore they're not needed either.
How anyone finds anything I don't know but I guess we'll find out!
Wow the end of an era. I first heard about it at Cal through college roommates. I haven’t used it much lately but still.. sad to see it go.
I already kinda moved away from reading it after Anand moved to Apple. The quality and frequency seemed to drop and I lost interest.
Wow, so sad to see it go... this was one of my main websites in the early days of the net. Helped me build so many computers and loved the community. I even built a website with some of the Anandtech team that consolidated reviews across the net during college. Sad day. Change be changing.
I am disturbed by the death of long-form content happening. Google is failing.
I felt a deep sadness after reading just the first paragraph, and I had to stop there for a while. It's very powerful. If you run your own business(es), you know how challenging it is. The stories of unicorns (epsilons) are rare and almost insignificant compared to the reality faced by most businesses.
I read Toms Hardware before AT even existed. Toms had a dark era for a while, but Anandtech has fallen off hard for years now. It hasn't been worth even visiting. I still visit Tom's though! For me, this is a fitting end that I started with Tom's and still reading it as AT shuts down.
A red flag needs to go up when Future PLC buys anything.
We need a case to be made for enthusiast-owned media. Anything left to the corporates will eventually degrade and die.
This is something I will work on, once I reach the stage of my life that involves capital. Things need to be better for the niche reporting world.
It's very sad but not unexpected. Hard to live off advertising when your demographics are prime adblock users. I did disable adblock on AnandTech when I remembered to, and gritted my teeth at how awful it was to have ads covering every square millimeter of free space.
Man, this is some sad, sad news.
Goodbye, and thank you for the content that has accompanied me for more than a decade.
Over to "Samsung will release THIS device on 2nd October" headlines in media that survive.
Anandtech, Slashdot, etc. These are some of the best websites that I followed throughout my career. Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin for example. Phoronix is another. Level1Tech replaced some of these for me but the long forms are harder to come by these days.
I wonder when text based media actually became unsustainable on Internet. And how publications somehow lasted until now, was there still someone funding them in hopes of them working out? Like whole timeframe when things went from somewhat sustainable to unsustainable.
But the site gets millions of clicks per month. Why would they kill a google ads printing machine?
My journey into building computers and networking were partly driven by Anandtech. I bought and sold quite a few things on the forums, too. I always thought Anandtech was one of the higher quality tech publications. RIP to one of the best.
I'm glad to hear the forums are still going to be around. They certainly aren't as popular as they once were but I still consider myself a part of that community and enjoy conversing with the old timers once and awhile.
I first came across AnandTech sometime in the fall of 2020 when covid lockdowns were still going strong and I was starting to get more interested in computer hardware. It seemed like a pretty decent site with good articles in a world full of crappy seo-optimized clickbait. I usually go there to read about new CPUs or CPU designs that have been released by AMD, ARM, etc. These days it feels like those aren't coming out as frequently as they did back then (not sure if this is true or if there's just more going on in my life these days) and as a result I haven't spent much time on their site lately.
I'll miss them, but for what it's worth they could probably be replaced by one guy with a decent substack. Or maybe that already exists, if anyone has any recommendations let me know.
I did not expected such a sad news this Friday ...
AnandTech - one of THE sites that literally done hardware upbringing for me ... will be no more.
Thank you for all the in depth reviews and explanation how hardware work - I use this knowledge to this day ...
Farewell.
I really don’t want to watch ad riddled reviews on YouTube. I always went to their site to read an actual article that goes into depth about tech and gave great reviews. Truly a sad day for the internet.
Sad day but I guess Anand moving to Apple made this more plausible. I’m going to miss the meticulously perf charts. They do have some great talent, I hope they go on to do great tech journalism.
Dang silly videos took down written journalism. Readers are mourning.
Some macro-trends that must have contributed:
* Rise of social media
* Popularity of short-form video
* Significant deceleration in single-core performance gains
* Focus on fashion (e.g. colored LEDs) over performance in computers
* Popularity of smartphones/consoles
>Focus on fashion
People have been tricking out their rigs with fancy lighting since the beginning, it's not a new development.
Definitely not new, but a lot more prevalent now. Photos from early 2000s LAN parties are dominated by beige boxes.
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I assume it is because DIY PCs plateaued two decades ago. Now it's all Macs, mobiles, and consoles.
Agree. The most significant improvement in a long time has been has been SSDs. Was cool to have lived through a period where compute power was delivering real-world 2x performance every 18 months.
There just isn’t a need for legacy media anymore. Anyone can shitpost all day on X or Threads and reach an audience 10x that of AnandTech or any other traditional media outfit.
Haven't all the good review article sites disappeared at this point? DPReview springs to mind.
Anandtech was always reliable. It was Tom's Hardware when Tom's Hardware sold out (some 20 years ago). Many here may not even know that Tom's Hardware was originally a well-respected source of information. But I guess Tom's Hardware was a glimpse into the future, low-quality content litttered with affiliate-spam.
But there is a market for high-quality content still. I can't help but think that the article sites simply failed to adapt. Look at Linus's Tech Tips [1]. Yes, video production is expensive but the advertising revenue is also higher.
None of these sites seemed to have adapted to the world of short form video content (Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, IG Reels) in a way that feels fresh, organic and useful.
Reddit seems to be the last bastion of getting authentic information and even that is steadily getting astroturfed.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/linustechtips
I'm confused, was he the only writer left? I know Anand doesn't run the site anymore, but is there really nobody to keep the site running with new articles?
> In-depth reporting isn’t always as sexy or as exciting as other avenues, but now, more than ever, it’s necessary to counter sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions.
Very true. But, in-depth reporting doesn't have to be not-sexy either. Considering the marked drop in audience attention spans in today's world along with the emergence of AI-driven knowledge sources, journalists will benefit a lot from just improving their presentation from long-form writing to something analogous to presentation slides with understandable visualizations.
I wonder how much of a difference our ad-blockers made to their revenue; I always liked AnandTech and now I'll feel guilty about leaving my blocker enabled.
The reader demographic is more likely to run adblockers because installing them is trivial to us - in the same way a reader of a cooking website discussing flour products can probably bake a cake with their eyes closed (I on the other hand would probably burn down the kitchen).
early days, it was a great site and a valuable resource. It became less so over the years to the point I forgot about it. Kind of like Tom's Hardware.
It ran great articles to the very end but it also had some series that were real stinkers.
The one that bugged me was the monthly roundup of HDDs where, usually, they recommended that you pay $100 extra to get an expensive consumer HDD that, according to the spec sheet, was 3db quieter and consumed maybe 0.5W less than an inexpensive enterprise HDD (funny reversal, but the enterprise product is a mass-produced product they sell a lot of and all the hyper-thin SKUs aimed at consumers probably sold one here and one there) although anything is one bad bearing away from being 20db louder.
This went in for years but they never confronted the issue directly by taking measurements or asking if the HDD industry was destroying itself by offering too many SKUs — if WD had just one SKU maybe Best Buy would stock it, but if there is a different one for a 2 bay NAS, a 3 bay NAS, a 4 bay NAS, and for recording video they won’t stock any of them. (And with all those spurious choices they didn’t give you a clear choice of CMR vs SMR!)
Charlie Demerjian stands almost alone as a tech journalist who doesn’t get high on the industry’s supply and, on that level, Anandtech was another tech outlet dependent on that industry that couldn’t give it the tough love to point out rampant brand destruction. Charlie told you 5 years ago that Intel’s product roadmap was a suicide note, Anandtech sure didn’t.
SemiAccurate has always been true to its name: occasional scoops but mixed with a lot of hyperbole, bluster, half truths and things that are just flat out wrong.
Back when I worked at a semiconductor company, reading any articles about us was always very funny because it always had more things wrong than right.
This was a site with good content and whenever there was a link pointing to AnandTech I knew there was something interesting to discover.
Thanks for all the good work!
First time I’m actually seeing a picture of Anand! Always figured there is probably some young guy named that behind it but never put a face to it
Unsurprising - people don’t pay, and their audience is perhaps a bit more likely to use Adblock, not to mention the decline in news in general.
Did someone create an archive for this site? It's a treasure trove for future generations to see how it distorted views when needed.
> we’ll still have a place for everyone to talk about the latest in technology – and have those discussions last longer than 48 hours.
Good jab!
Did not think Anandtech would have lasted almost 30 years. Sad non the less. What's the oldest tech site still around now?
God, I used to read Anandtech religiously in the '00s. So sad to see them closing shop, even though I understand why.
Ugh so sad. I really liked AnandTech's knowledgeable product reviews, especially SSD reviews and benchmarks.
With 27 years of people’s trust, I think this is one of the best exits of tech history.
Even though it’s not best financially.
Absolutely gutted to see another long running website from the glory days of the Internet closing up shop.
In a hostile landscape it seems that the good ones shutdown, and the indifferent ones sell out.
all good things come to an end - others do too but we won't remember them.
good run, and remember from the late 90s - later at my interview in Lehman Brothers, the hiring manager was looking at the site when I walked in and that was the small talk. RIP AnandTech
Farewell team. One of my favorite quality reads of genuine hardware pieces on the Internet.
Damn. End of an era. Anandtech was the reason I got into hardware and computers in general.
It's truly sad to see one of few traditional web sites of extraordinary quality go.
One of the few tech outlets that I find to be trustworthy, it's sad to see them go.
Can't believe it! Thank you, Anadtech, for all the great stuff over the years.
This is a bit sad.
Tech report became a zombie about a decade ago.
Tom's hardware has always just been 'mid'.
I feel old
I guess it's too much work to write articles all the time?
Sad to read this, but all things pass I guess. Spent a large chunk of my life posting on and reading the AT forum. Last I checked I still have a mod account. Things sort of started to go downhill for me with the sale to... meh can't even recall the purchaser it's been so long. Farewell AT, thanks for all the good advice on builds and overclocking through the years.
One of my main bookmarks when I got an internet connection. o7
This is a very sad day. Along the way in my life and career I had a brief stint building custom computers for other people, and I spent quite a lot of time getting into overclocking for myself. Those journeys and my interest in computer hardware, performance, security, and how that impacted systems was heavily influenced by gaming and by the community that surrounded it. Most of the places I used to haunt are long gone, but through all that AnandTech was always around. It's the first place I go when I want to learn about a piece of hardware, and now it's gone.
I am happy at least that there are others trying to carry the torch. Gamer's Nexus, Chips and Cheese, and a few small blogs here and there are still trying to dig into the nitty gritty of computer hardware in a way that's not only approachable, but accurate, without all the marketing BS. It's unfortunate though that it's so hard to make something like this survive.
Thank you AnandTech. Happy ride in to the sunset.
It will be missed.
> AnandTech’s final boss
Quips like that, are one reason.
Felt like it went downhill once Ian Cutress left..
So much nostalgia from my teen and 20s, this site was not only entertaining but equally educational and always looked forward to reading the next review. I hadn't thought much of this website frankly in decades, but this is a bittersweet encounter, thank you for all the great memories and all the knowledges bestowed upon us.
Sometimes I wonder if my knowledge on hardware and software integration is largely because of I have been reading Anandtech ( and many other sources ) since late 90s.
It first stated as the journey of AMD CPU. Who wouldn't want the best bang for the bucks. And then Pentium II / III, SSE. Pentium 4, Itanium, AMD64. Pentium M, Core, and then the rise of SSD. In between that we also have many Video Card reviews, S3, Matrox, Voodoo, Nvidia, ATI, PowerVR, explanation of Playstation CELL processor. Creative Sound Blaster. I think by mid 2000 all those news were quite boring. Largely because most of the consumer decisions are settled. Until iPhone came around Anandtech was the first and perhaps still the only tech site that goes behind the scene and start looking not only the Apple technology but a educational guess behind the rationale why some of those product decisions were introduced. And only after a few years Anand himself got hired from Apple.
I also remember my first death threat on Anandtech Forums from Intel Fan Boys. That was before most tech people knew much about TSMC. There was a time when people think Intel is an undisputed king in technology and wont believe TSMC would take over.
Lot of memories. It is very unfortunate Anandtech is closing down. I just wish I am a multi billionaire and could buy it and keep it running even as a hobby. Somewhat fortunate is that we have Chips and Cheese, a relatively new site which fills a lot of what Anandtech used to do. Servethehome for Enterprise section.
Really Sad. I know some of current and ex-anandtech staff lurks on HN but dont post much. Farewell, Thank You and Good Luck to you all.
Jesus I had no idea Anandtech was in trouble. Did they ever say anything about it? I would've signed up for a Patreon to keep them afloat.
They’ve been gradually dropping in quantity (though not quality) for a decade. The writing’s been on the wall for a long time.
Yeah I don't think they ever mentioned anything before this. I suspect this was a slow decline over several years and many meetings where they realized they'd either have to "sell out" or shut doors - if it were a new sudden thing they probably would've asked for help or indicated a willingness to try and stay afloat. I can't really blame them.
up next slashdot?
feels like the old internet is nearly gone
Not Slashdot, buy soylent news is also circling the drain...
RIP Anandtech.
anybody here remembers jc-news ?
Was that the old latin publication where Pontius Pilate had his weekly column?
no. some guy doing in-depth reviews of cpus/etc. jc-news.com (you can browse it via archive.org)
sic transit gloria mundi
> the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was - nor will it ever be again
This is very darkly ominous and of course it does not apply just to tech journalism.
Written communication, by real people, is not an optional luxury, its the best means to exchange dense, valuable, high quality information.
It feels as if the current digital "economy" is hell-bent to turn society into an illiterate, short-video watching, ad-clicking mob.
Not sure there has ever been technological innovation that was so regressive in its impact, profiting by actively degrading the human condition. Alas, here we are and we can't blame the Martians.
I would push back some. Humans have communicated orally long before writing and lectures / interviews / discussions remain highly effective.
After all, not everyone was in favor of the pulp that churned from mass-market printing presses.
However, I can certainly imagine a voice-enabled LLM trained on European History that students could learn a lot from. People have been printing books for 500+ years, but we’ve really only gotten into user-generated video within the past 10 years.
Throughout my childhood video was really quite time-consuming to produce. It largely still is. If we can continue get that friction down, then over time I expect we’ll se more and more valuable video content being produced.
Compare broadcast television's first days with what it is now. There are a lot of parallels.
OTOH, although not tech journalism, but consider the Substack success of The Free Press and some others. There might be some light at the end of this tunnel.
It’s not really a “current economy” thing or anything to do with technological innovation itself. As someone mentioned elsewhere, our economic model of line must go up quarterly forever is the real thing to fix here. Does turning society into an illiterate mob make sense long-term? Most would say no. Does it make sense short-term? Unfortunately it makes a lot of sense as long as you can get out with your cash hoard before everything burns. Companies are simply acting towards what we have been incentivizing for decades now.
> you can get out with your cash hoard
cash is effectively claims against what other people can give you in the future.
An illiterate mob can only give you very few things of value. So, indeed, this is short-termism running society to the ground - as if there is no tomorrow.
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A bit sad. But I haven't checked the site in 10+ years. It was hot in the heydays of the Internet and Pentium processors, reading reviews about CPU and motherboard performance really helped in deciding what to buy when a top of the line computer was already obsolete a year later.
Progress has essentially halted since 15+ years. Back then a new computer really coud do something the old one didn't even dreamt of. Now what can the new generation of CPU do? Watch YouTube shorts even shorter? :) Or the new Android or Apple phone? Send more pictures on WhatsApp? Literally don't see any difference between my current phone / computer compared to what I had 10 years ago. (I don't play games, maybe there it's visible somewhat).
Anyhow, it was nice while it lasted but all good things must come to an end ... Bye Anandtech, you will be remembered.
Knew them for most of their existence, though I never actually read them that often.
On the one hand a bittersweet end to a familiar editorial, on the other hand a deserved end to one of many "journalism" outlets. No, I don't have a good opinion of journalists.
In any case, RIP.
What killed it? that's terrible
For Anandtech to shut down means we are headed for a major recession.
[dead]
Wait what is happening?
I'd like to bring AnandTech content to the public domain. Put it on the world wide scroll.
Let me know if I can help breck7@gmail.com
From the article:
> Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable.
I feel old now. Shoot me
What? And you get to miss the election?
Maybe a potential acquirer could start a video team to catchup with modern times.
I am not super familiar with AnandTech, but I question the idea that "tech journalism" is dead or dying. Marques Brownlee has almost 20 million subscribers on YouTube. Consumer Reports has 6 million members. Etc.
The difference, I think, is that media is shifting to video as the default, for better or worse. Looking at their YouTube channel, AnandTech only has about 20,000 subscribers, which looks like they never quite figured out how to transfer their content into video format.
Video was a mistake. Even high quality YouTube tech channels (like GamersNexus) work far better in a text format where you can compare benchmark results without running the video in mpv, taking dozens of screenshots, and then painstakingly comparing them. And that channel has a charismatic anchor, unlike many.
At least they have a website with the same material.
Have a look at rtings and try to come up with an idea how to make this work in a video format:
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm4-wi...
https://www.rtings.com/mouse/reviews/logitech/g305-lightspee...
without losing 90% of information and getting shitty jokes instead.
It doesn't really matter if it "was a mistake," because it's what the market is asking for. Cars were probably a mistake ecologically, vs. horses, but it's what we've got.
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The article hints at this, with the following sentence: "Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again" (emphasis on the written).
Yeah, it's just weird to me that this entity with a big following and storied history isn't willing to adapt to the times, or even get a little creative and figure out how to do longform video combined with longform text.
I don't think Marques is a tech journalist. He is a consumer goods journalist.You wouldn't see videos about architecture of Zen processor and their impact from Marques. Not a criticism, different fields.
I would describe him as a tech enthusiast.
His content doesn't have the journalistic quality that feels like he is going out and digging for stories etc. The content is given to him by companies and he chooses to showcase what he is given.
There is not really anything wrong with that either but I don't expect any real scoops to come from his channel.
I agree, but so does the article; I quote: "Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again."
>I am not super familiar with AnandTech
>Marques Brownlee ( MKBHD )
I think comparing Anandtech to MKBHD is quite offensive. There is at least multiple order of magnitude difference.
For worse.
The main reason for tech journalism being more sustainable on YouTube is non-skippable ads and the recommendation algorithm.
Unlike a random blog, I can pay YouTube to remove all the ads. I watch GN videos, and they get paid, but I never see ads other than GN's sponsor message and merch which are trivial to skip.
Compare AnandTech which has always been a user-hostile visual insult. The whole article is covered in ads. You can barely find the words. The articles are needlessly split over 25 pages so you click and load over and over. They really pioneered a lot of bad patterns.
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I'm more optimistic. Video may be clunky and largely difficult to search within now, but in the near future, with AI transcription and some kind of new UI, will become as easy to access as text is today.