Same. It&#x27;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.

I&#x27;ve been reading Anandtech for over a decade. Sad to see it go.

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.

Ian Cutress (TechTechPotato) made an emotional goodbye video this morning: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY</a>Tangent: Interesting coincidence that this is ten years to the day of Ryan Smith&#x27;s tenure.

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&#x27;s substack fills the place for me that AnandTech used to.

Man, this is some sad, sad news.Goodbye, and thank you for the content that has accompanied me for more than a decade.

Happily the RWT forum remains up and active. It&#x27;s an absolute goldmine for deep discussions on processors.

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.

Loved their MacBook reviews. And then eventually quit doing them.

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.

They&#x27;re afaik owned by the same company, so it makes sense to point people there.

I think Chips and Cheese is the real successor, but they are a small group with less throughput.

What about Ars Technica? It used to be pretty in-depth. Not sure about lately.

Some of their reviews are either weird or questionable. I read them quite regularly, but I no longer trust most of what they say.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.servethehome.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.servethehome.com&#x2F;</a> has been scaling up their reporting as of late.

&gt; 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.

That might&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s a decent boost but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.

&gt; 
You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performanceConcerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance: dream on ... :-(

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&#x27;t have much to do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).

Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren&#x27;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.

There must be a market for video information converted to text. It would be completely illegal, of course.

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.

yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text in ~30 seconds.

Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn&#x27;t it?

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&#x27;t even in the same ballpark. It boggles my mind that so many people prefer videos, given how much slower they are. It&#x27;s enough to make me cynically wonder if people these days are illiterate or something.

I&#x27;m always surprised at how many non-tech people don&#x27;t know about their browser&#x27;s ability to search in the page. I&#x27;ve been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they&#x27;ll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.

&gt; terrible at video scrubbingIt is partly the form, video, but more so the access method, the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through because the file isn&#x27;t cached and takes a few milliseconds to several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface also doesn&#x27;t help because usually they lack controls for skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and backwards.

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 &quot;Here is my favorite method for unclogging a drain&quot; video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini telling you what it is.I don&#x27;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&#x27;t want to trudge through filler video after clickbait headlines.

I didn&#x27;t realize how bad this has gotten until I was looking for a GPU undervolting guideWhat 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

&gt; I can&#x27;t stand watching videos on something I need information for &lt;right now&gt;. Maybe I&#x27;m just terrible at video scrubbingDo not worry: in a very short while we&#x27;ll all have AI tools, running locally, that can summarize videos in textual forms in a split second.Prompt: &quot;Summarize this vid in five paragraphs. List specs.&quot;It already exists. In a short while we&#x27;ll all have this at home.P.S: prompt: &quot;Remove every single ad and submarine content too&quot;.

I can&#x27;t stand watching videos on something I need information for &lt;right now&gt;. Maybe I&#x27;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&#x27;m looking for very quickly.I suppose they can&#x27;t force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.

I never understand the obsession with video. It&#x27;s the first thing my kids reach for when searching for information about something and it&#x27;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 agree but it&#x27;s a little deceptive. For example I have a 4070 right now and I paid $600 for it. That&#x27;s good money but it is more than likely far more than most people actually need.If you watch or read reviews, you&#x27;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&#x27;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 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.

Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer&#x2F;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.

I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform&#x2F;advertiser preference. It&#x27;s hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it&#x27;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&#x27;t really short form in that &quot;10:02&quot; way. Like there&#x27;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.

I think it&#x27;s a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume.I&#x27;ve noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I&#x27;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&#x27;t read anymore.

&gt; yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are usingDoesn&#x27;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.

First it was written reviews, then it was youtube videos, soon it will be short fast paced TikTok clips.

Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video &amp; merch money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamersnexus.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamersnexus.net&#x2F;</a>It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it&#x27;s easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts &amp; script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you&#x27;re basically doneThe speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.

Also, I never saw half an ad on anandtech, or never noticed..Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.

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&#x27;t help that it feels like there hasn&#x27;t been an increase in performance to price ratio for GPU&#x27;s in the longest time.

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

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 would guess somewhere around 1997 when Anand started the site.

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

Wow! Out of curiosity,  which year was it?

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.

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.

It was super ahead of it&#x27;s time with all the crazy functionality and connection.. flowed together really smoothly.I think there&#x27;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.

Do you know Lucee?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lucee.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lucee.org&#x2F;</a>

I agree. I did really well in my career with it

I don&#x27;t care what anybody says, ColdFusion was a beautiful mess and fun to write.

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.

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&#x27;t even recall the purchaser it&#x27;s been so long. Farewell AT, thanks for all the good advice on builds and overclocking through the years.

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.

I&#x27;m glad to hear the website will stay up, for now.This makes me wonder if there&#x27;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&#x2F;portability (printed book) and usability&#x2F;access (website).

I&#x27;m glad to hear the forums are still going to be around. They certainly aren&#x27;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.

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.

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.

&gt; And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t _enough_ of it per unit of time.

Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though.Of course it&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;t really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either &quot;solved&quot; 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&#x27;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 &quot;wish it away&quot;.

&gt; Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaitingI&#x27;ve been reading Phoronix for years and I don&#x27;t recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.Even skimming <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news</a> 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?

Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there&#x27;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 -&gt; aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support&#x2F;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&#x27;s Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it&#x27;s Windows focused, sadly.

&gt; we&#x27;ve passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous contentI&#x27;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 &#x27;sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content&#x27; 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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x27;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 &quot;user agent&quot;. The ad-focused web doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s a wild idea. It&#x27;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.

I never believed that internet advertising was worth what it supposedly is. Stuff like this seems to confirm it for me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adexchanger.com&#x2F;on-tv-and-video&#x2F;googles-second-worse-wave-of-alleged-ad-fraud-means-advertisers-need-full-transparency&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adexchanger.com&#x2F;on-tv-and-video&#x2F;googles-second-w...</a>I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn&#x27;t been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.

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.

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&#x27;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 &quot;I&#x27;m willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM&quot; 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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Texture_(app)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Texture_(app)</a>

From TFA:&gt; 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:&gt; There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverageIt&#x27;s Friday so I&#x27;m going to be optimistic. I&#x27;d like to think (maybe fantasise) that we&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of &quot;cost&quot; 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 &quot;free internet&quot; myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there&#x27;s an upside, it&#x27;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&#x27;d rather cling to something hopeful.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;stratechery-plus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;stratechery-plus&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41391412">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41391412</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ladybird.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ladybird.org&#x2F;</a>--EDIT: fixed grammar.

If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I&#x27;ll opt for that. I&#x27;ve donated at other times when that option is available.Otherwise I don&#x27;t want to be tracked profusely. 
Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.

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 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 don&#x27;t use an adblocker because I&#x27;m not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don&#x27;t go to that site, these sites won&#x27;t learn until people stop using them. I&#x27;ve had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn&#x27;t that bad of you just don&#x27;t spend all your time on crappy sites.I&#x27;ll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don&#x27;t pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they&#x27;ll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.

The article states fairly clearly that they&#x27;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&#x27;s getting to the juicy parts.

&gt; I&#x27;m not saying you shouldn&#x27;t block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domainAnd 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&#x27;m sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.

HN user offers to pay $1.99&#x2F;year for many carefully done review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.

&gt;There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverageWhile 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&#x27;t like hearing it, but the &quot;I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don&#x27;t have to&quot; mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.I&#x27;m not saying you shouldn&#x27;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.

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.

but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn&#x27;t work?I remember reading AnandTech &gt;20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they&#x27;ve hardly published anything. They didn&#x27;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.

I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the quality of AnandTech can&#x27;t figure out a viable business model.

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&#x27;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.

Chips and Cheese is Anandtech&#x27;s spiritual successor and I think its patron model is probably better overall.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chipsandcheese.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chipsandcheese.com&#x2F;</a>David Kanter doesn&#x27;t write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it&#x27;s one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realworldtech.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realworldtech.com&#x2F;</a>

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&#x27;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.)

Good opportunity to make the best of the forums. I would prefer traditional forums for community building over anything else.

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.

Guess you&#x27;ve never watched one of their failure analysis videos then, or really any of them if that&#x27;s your comment.

Gamers Nexus is not very technical though, they probably don&#x27;t understand how a CPU works.

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&#x27;t. Gaming content has gone this way a lot sadly.

&gt; 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.

Nobody pays for words, but YouTube pays for videos. Sad but true.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamersnexus.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamersnexus.net&#x2F;</a>

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.

&gt; Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of obsessively in-depth coverage.Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.It&#x27;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&#x27;s hard to avoid even though I prefer other mediums...

That&#x27;s what I thought as well, but then I saw their competition. Their ratio of bragging vs doing their homework is actually top notch.

I feel like the &quot;Cable TV-ification&quot; applies to them, some of the videos are very much sensationalism. The host also comes off as a bit too full of themselves

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&#x27;t vanished.

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.

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.

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&#x27;s Hardware.

The impression I&#x27;ve got from said people here on HN is that search engines are disgusting ad powered horrors and therefore they&#x27;re not needed either.How anyone finds anything I don&#x27;t know but I guess we&#x27;ll find out!

That wish didn&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; 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&#x27;t believe the web needs to be academic reporting or sensationalist garbage - as long as there&#x27;s a balance, I&#x27;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&#x2F;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?

I bought my first AMD Processor after reading review of it on their website in 2002.

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.

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.

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.

It sounds like Future Brand, the owner of both AnandTech and Tom&#x27;s Hardware wanted to consolidate.

&gt; Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you&#x27;re doing these things.Yup. However, I can&#x27;t find a confirmation anywhere in TFA. Just some hints here and there. So I wonder, what finally made them quit?

&gt; Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you&#x27;re doing these things.If you&#x27;re on an advertising model, yes, impossible even.If you&#x27;re on a patronage&#x2F;subscription model, totally doable nowadays.

The comments about &quot;AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o&#x27;clock-news reporting&quot; are interesting.Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you&#x27;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&#x27;s the case, those practices eventually eat their own tail. No new Anandtech content to ignore or copy now, for example.

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.

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&#x27;s whitelist.

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...

&gt; marketing overtook technological improvement in product developmentI 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&#x27;t matter anymore. Third-party chipsets are no longer a thing, and there&#x27;s little difference between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a full integrated northbridge now.And honestly, today&#x27;s PCs are powerful enough that there&#x27;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&#x27;s not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you&#x27;d feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.

I don&#x27;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 &amp; chip level, through the rapidly changing evolution of motherboards, CPUs &amp; 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&#x27;t been a compelling reason to continue this depth of analysis or writing for the past decade or so.

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;m concerned. Not only were they delayed, but their reviews weren&#x27;t even the most in depth any more.--[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;10325&#x2F;the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;10325&#x2F;the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-...</a>

Around the year 2000 (don&#x27;t remember exactly) there were 3 sites I checked daily: Anandtech, Tom&#x27;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.

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?

HN might as well put up a black ribbon for this news.

I felt a deep sadness after reading just the first paragraph,  and I had to stop there for a while. It&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s shocking to realize I&#x27;ve been reading AnandTech&#x27;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&#x27;s truly a sad day for the tech community.

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&#x27;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&#x27;d either have to &quot;sell out&quot; or shut doors - if it were a new sudden thing they probably would&#x27;ve asked for help or indicated a willingness to try and stay afloat. I can&#x27;t really blame them.

Jesus I had no idea Anandtech was in trouble. Did they ever say anything about it? I would&#x27;ve signed up for a Patreon to keep them afloat.

&gt; 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&#x27;t have to be not-sexy either. Considering the marked drop in audience attention spans in today&#x27;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 agree. Archivists shouldn&#x27;t hold their breath, anyway.

I am already mirroring the entire site lol

&gt; 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.

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&#x27;s battery tests provided the proof consumers needed.It&#x27;s sad to see the state of &#x27;tech journalism&#x27; in the Youtube age when it comes to hardware products. I feel like I&#x27;m watching a 20-minute lifestyle commercial rather than an actual nuts-and-bolts review. I guess that&#x27;s what gets views and affiliate link revenue now.

From the article:&gt; 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.

Wait what is happening?I&#x27;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

A very sad, but not unexpected, end to another important source of quality journalism. Outcompeted, no doubt, by the noise &amp; 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.

I&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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.

For worse.The main reason for tech journalism being more sustainable on YouTube is non-skippable ads and the recommendation algorithm.

I agree, but so does the article; I quote:
&quot;Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again.&quot;

Yeah, it&#x27;s just weird to me that this entity with a big following and storied history isn&#x27;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.

The article hints at this, with the following sentence: &quot;Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again&quot; (emphasis on the written).

It doesn&#x27;t really matter if it &quot;was a mistake,&quot; because it&#x27;s what the market is asking for. Cars were probably a mistake ecologically, vs. horses, but it&#x27;s what we&#x27;ve got.

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:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;sony&#x2F;wh-1000xm4-wireless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;sony&#x2F;wh-1000xm4-wi...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;mouse&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;logitech&#x2F;g305-lightspeed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;mouse&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;logitech&#x2F;g305-lightspee...</a>without losing 90% of information and getting shitty jokes instead.

I would describe him as a tech enthusiast.His content doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t expect any real scoops to come from his channel.

I don&#x27;t think Marques is a tech journalist. He is a consumer goods journalist.You wouldn&#x27;t see videos about architecture of Zen processor and their impact from Marques. Not a criticism, different fields.

&gt;I am not super familiar with AnandTech&gt;Marques Brownlee ( MKBHD )I think comparing Anandtech to MKBHD is quite offensive. There is at least multiple order of magnitude difference.

I am not super familiar with AnandTech, but I question the idea that &quot;tech journalism&quot; 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.

In a hostile landscape it seems that the good ones shutdown, and the indifferent ones sell out.

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&amp;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&#x27;t even cover the iphone or galaxy or pixel launches. How on earth was that meant to survive?

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.

I assume it is because DIY PCs plateaued two decades ago. Now it&#x27;s all Macs, mobiles, and consoles.

Definitely not new, but a lot more prevalent now. Photos from early 2000s LAN parties are dominated by beige boxes.

&gt;Focus on fashionPeople have been tricking out their rigs with fancy lighting since the beginning, it&#x27;s not a new development.

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&#x2F;consoles

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.

There&#x27;s an excellent podcast called Acquired with a 3-part episode covering the birth and evolution of NVIDIA, highly recommended.

Slackware!!! Dang, I had forgotten that name. That was the first distro I installed as well. Xeyes and stuff. Oh, dear...

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.

I got hooked with Yggdrasil on CD-RROM. The 20+ 3.5” floppies was too bulky for me.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yggdrasil_Linux&#x2F;GNU&#x2F;X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yggdrasil_Linux&#x2F;GNU&#x2F;X</a>

&gt; 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&#x27;re getting old, then I must be too, because I know your pain. I don&#x27;t remember the last time I saw new tech(1) that felt like a real novelty to me.Now that I&#x27;ve been fully in &quot;career mode&quot; for a few years, I have the budget to engage in my hobbies with greater depth than ever before, and that&#x27;s amazing. Yet, I&#x27;ve found myself going deeper and deeper into the &quot;retro.&quot; Old computers, old cameras, old music formats, etc. It&#x27;s easier to find novelty there.(1): this is limited to tech. There&#x27;s great new music that isn&#x27;t too hard to come by if you can manage to train Spotify&#x27;s algorithm to give it to you.

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 racesThere 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

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&#x27;s bin of &quot;stuff work wasn&#x27;t using anymore&quot; and I managed to put Ubuntu on it. I think it was an HP. I don&#x27;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&#x27;m now a firmware engineer, writing this comment on my work laptop, which is running Ubuntu.

Maybe a potential acquirer could start a video team to catchup with modern times.

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

Dang silly videos took down written journalism. Readers are mourning.

One of the few tech outlets that I find to be trustworthy, it&#x27;s sad to see them go.

I&#x27;m sad to hear that they&#x27;re shutting down. I thought that Anandtech would be one of the holdouts for written tech journalism in a world that&#x27;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.

Can&#x27;t believe it!
Thank you, Anadtech, for all the great stuff over the years.

Compare broadcast television&#x27;s first days with what it is now.  There are a lot of parallels.

&gt; you can get out with your cash hoardcash 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.

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.

I would push back some. Humans have communicated orally long before writing and lectures &#x2F; interviews &#x2F; 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.

&gt; the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was - nor will it ever be againThis 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 &quot;economy&quot; 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&#x27;t blame the Martians.

Oh man! Techreport was amazing back in the day. Now it’s unrecognizable.

Don&#x27;t forget the leading light for most of that time, TechReport. It absolutely breaks my heart to see what happened to that site...

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.

&gt; 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!

Damn. End of an era. Anandtech was the reason I got into hardware and computers in general.

Absolutely gutted to see another long running website from the glory days of the Internet closing up shop.

This is true, and I second your sadness. They always had those 1&#x2F;2&#x2F;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.

Anantech was the high watermark in tech journalism and the only place I&#x27;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&#x27;s awful.

I guess it&#x27;s too much work to write articles all the time?

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.

It&#x27;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.

Tom&#x27;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&#x27;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.

There was time I read Tom&#x27;s Hardware and thought that was the top of tech journalism and reviews,until the (i don&#x27;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&#x27;s the ultimate sadness.

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&#x27;t make a go of it. And the headwinds Anand and Ars etc faced... I remember back in the 90s they wouldn&#x27;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&#x2F;GPUs, and occasionally disks (spinning rust or solid state)- I thought I might have just been mentally ignoring those articles, but they really don&#x27;t exist anymore. Ars&#x2F;Anand&#x2F;Toms had reviews for models once every 6 months or so.Into the graveyard you go with, Aces Hardware, Sharky Extreme, Thresh&#x27;s Firingsquad, and I am sure I am forgetting others that I used to load up every day but just don&#x27;t exist anymore.

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&#x27;t find much on companies fillings.

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.

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 already kinda moved away from reading it after Anand moved to Apple. The quality and frequency seemed to drop and I lost interest.

Just wanted to say that I remember joining the Anandtech forums in middle school in the early 2000&#x27;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!

AnandTech Farewell