Godspeed And Fare Thee Well AnandTech ▉

Ryan Smith breaking the news:

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.

A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” – and we’ve been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We’ve gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we’d charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.

The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers.

Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.

I remember reading AnandTech back when I first started building PCs. AnandTech shutting down is a huge blow to the PC hardware community. Their reviews were always top notch and got tot he depths of places other reviews just don’t seem to have the stomach to go. AnandTech was one of the first places I checked for reviews of the 9950x.

My first PC was a Gateway 2000 machine sporting a Pentium 2 and, if memory serves, a whopping 64 MEGABYTES of RAM. It ran Windows 95 in a plain beige box. The best thing about it hardware wise was that it was sporting a Riva 128 “graphics accelerator” from a little known company called Nvidia. I was ordering what a friend of mine had essentially told me to get and when I mentioned the graphics the sales rep on the phone when ordering said “no you don’t want that, you want this” and it was the best upsell I think I’ve ever had. My grandparents bought that machine for me in late 1996, though it didn’t arrive until January of 97 but that machine was my gateway (no pun intended) into the world of PC Gaming and, little did I know, all the PC building, troubleshooting, and curiosity that comes with that.

I started reading them shortly after deciding it was time to replace that machine a few years later when I was building a machine around the upcoming Quake 3 Arena in the winter of 1999.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 27 years. In a way, I feel like I grew up with them even though I was 20 or so when I started this journey.

But Ryan also leaves us with a warning:

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 – and while we’re no longer going to be able to fulfill that role, the need for quality, in-depth reporting has not changed. If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.

For all the tech journalists out there right now – or tech journalists to be – I implore you to remain true to yourself, and to your readers’ needs. 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. 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.”

Yes, times have changed. YouTube has grabbed people’s attention and while there are great YouTube channels for tech out there, there is also a lot of sensationalism on there as well as people make click bait titles and thumbnails for low value videos. Social Media makes it even worse as people argue for engagement.

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