Comment by SirFatty
1 year ago
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.
1 year ago
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.