I hate this timeline.
It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.
For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.
↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech
This sudden loss is sending shockwaves through the industry, and rightfully so. AnandTech is a pillar, a cornerstone of hardware reporting, and one of the very few – possibly only – tech news outlet out there with such depth, quality, integrity, and restraint. I can’t think of any other outlet being as dedicated to proper benchmarking and hardware reviews as AnandTech was, and losing them is a huge loss for all of us.
The cause is exactly what you’d expect, sadly. It’s simply not really possible to remain profitable writing in-depth hardware reviews and benchmarks, as the world has shifted to video, and advertising income has cratered. There’s tons of hints about AnandTech not wanting to embrace sensationalism and clickbaiting to increase revenue – they’d rather go out with class, and I admire and appreciate that greatly. It just goes to show how hard it is to keep your head above water in the current online publishing world without rampant clickbaiting and flashy videos.
In a better, less monopolised world, AnandTech could thrive. Sadly, that’s not the timeline we’re in.
As far as housekeeping goes, the site will remain up for now, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay up forever. I’m sure countless people are already archiving the invaluable content AnandTech has produced over its 27 year run, including the forums. We shan’t lose what AnandTech has created.
That sucks. I myself have been consuming less and less hardware info over the years, I don’t buy that much, because luckily its not being outdated that fast anymore. Its interesting, but as everything has become more complex its really hard to compare benchmarks and determine anything. Everything is workload dependent and none of the synthetic benchmarks replicates the usage I see. I am encouraged by Linus Tech Tips investment in technical teams to benchmark everything, despite the clickbaity, entertainment first approach, I kinda trust most numbers I see from them, if I watch something. I’d still prefer AnandTech’s easily browseable site though.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I’ve got mixed feelings about LTT over Linus incompetence at times, especially at the start. At least now he’s got more qualified people doing the work and he’s just the face of the channel. I’ve found him to be bizarrely cheep, I think it was this year he justified a flawed LTT product review because he was complaining that it would cost him $500 to pay his staff to do it over. Yeah that’s a lot for me to pay, but his company is supposedly worth $100M and he should have had the integrity to do it right. Gamers Nexus is a better technical source for unbiased and comprehensive reviews. He’s been critical of LTT too.
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/linus-tech-tips-controversy-explained-gamers-nexus-video-ex-employee-accusations-2254115/
And LTT’s response acknowledges some problems.
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/linus-tech-tips-controversy-explained-gamers-nexus-video-ex-employee-accusations-2254115/
LTT deserves credit for making popular videos though, IMHO the focus more on entertainment than consistent and detailed reviews like Anandtech did. I’ve cited Anandtech so many times, their loss will be felt. It’s the type of role I might fit into, but I just don’t have the confidence of being able to make it work as a business. At least not without relying on the clickbait and sponsorships that make people question integrity.
AMD K6 review. Better times, for sure. I feel old…
The very first computer purchase I made that wasn’t bankrolled by my parents was a K6 processor (or maybe a voodoo 2 – but that went in the family PC). Different times.
Wow. The need for quality sources and reviews hasn’t gone away, but so many tech journalists have closed up shop and it’s sad to see another. I don’t know if it’s just rose tinted glasses, but it does seem like things are getting harder.
The industry became complacent after Google kind of took the reigns as the last mile publisher (that’s what search results are), and then used that position to push their ads platform, then squeeze it for all it’s worth. There may have been better avenues (check out what medium is doing, or substack), but the industry for the worse went with “free” consumption paid by ads. That model doesn’t work any more (arguably never really did), and LLMs are just going to make it worse.
CaptainN–,
I’m not sure if you heard about this…
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/21/media/google-california-pay-newsrooms-journalists-content-deal/index.html
It does seem to acknowledge that professional journalism and newsrooms are dying off because they cannot compete with tech companies like google, who have a business model that enables them to acts as a middle man and take advertisers away without the overhead of having to pay journalists. Newsrooms being dependent on the state & lawmakers just to stay afloat feels very awkward. The intentions may be good, but I worry that this arrangement will come back to bite us. Politicians can and will pull financial levers at the newsroom to make coverage continent on political favors. This will put us closer to state controlled media like it exists in russia Obviously we’re nowhere close to that here, but the inability for news to remain independently viable long term is unsettling.
A general fund for independent media may be important, but the risk of politicians pulling strings is quite high.
https://www.indy100.com/politics/trump/donald-trump-npr-funding
The likes of Google and Meta are killing the feedstock for the AI, which basically means the AI replacing the quality source will just make up even more sh1t!
As for all those Youtubers surfing the waves using the likes of AnandTech as a defacto script writer, life just got a lot tougher. Cynical as I may be, I’m sensing some anarchy on the why as they begin puishing bullsh1zen to fill the void in the absence of a quality source to lazily rip off, and so it’s a down hill decent in a b1tch fight outing each others bullsh1t!
I really, really, hate this timelime with passion.
Good riddance. Anand has become dumpster fire since future plc took it up.
There are a lot better sources on web like http://www.servethehome.com or http://www.nextplatform.com
Tannhäuser Gate
I’m sad to see anandtech go even when there are other review sources.
While I do enjoy patrick @ servethehome’s reviews. When I actually need to buy products, I find the site poorly organized and difficult to navigate. Similar products are hard to find.. I blame the blog format here, it places too much emphasis on the latest reviews as news. But when your doing product research and comparisons, it’s not good that you end up stumbling on other relevant reviews by chance. IMHO other sites like anandtech have been more useful for consistent product comparisons. It seems to me that servethehome would benefit greatly from a database to keeps related products organized and searchable.