Friday, August 30th 2024
AnandTech Shuts Down, an Icon of Tech News and Reviews Rides into the Sunset
AnandTech, a tech publication that practically everyone in the computing industry is aware of, announced that it is shutting down. Named after its founder, Anand Lal Shimpi, AnandTech was founded in 1997 by the then 15-year-old Anand, and went on to become one of the top sources of PC hardware and gaming news and reviews, particularly in the golden age of PC (the 1990s and the 2000s). It is one of the key sites that inspired the founding of TechPowerUp. Anand and his crew have remained our friends and peers throughout this time.
Some of the biggest tectonic shifts in the tech world were parsed through Anand's keyboard. At age 32, Anand left the publication he founded to pursue a job with Apple, handing it to his friend and editor, Ryan Smith, and publisher Purch, which was later acquired by Future PLC. The site would continue to maintain the highest standards of reporting and evaluation for the following decade. AnandTech says that Future PLC will keep the site up and running, so all of its invaluable content remains accessible. We will dearly miss you, AnandTech.
Some of the biggest tectonic shifts in the tech world were parsed through Anand's keyboard. At age 32, Anand left the publication he founded to pursue a job with Apple, handing it to his friend and editor, Ryan Smith, and publisher Purch, which was later acquired by Future PLC. The site would continue to maintain the highest standards of reporting and evaluation for the following decade. AnandTech says that Future PLC will keep the site up and running, so all of its invaluable content remains accessible. We will dearly miss you, AnandTech.
151 Comments on AnandTech Shuts Down, an Icon of Tech News and Reviews Rides into the Sunset
Scott and Geoff did great reviews, and Scott started the whole frametime/inside-the-second thing that I’m thrilled TPU still uses. Always enjoyed Anand too, though I didn’t drop in there as much.
This is the best written format tech site left. :lovetpu:
And it should be. Smartphones are the primary computing modality for consumers in the 2020s. Almost all of the major computing innovations over the past ten years have been popularized on smartphones. Display panel technology, touchscreen, NFC contactless transactions, facial recognition, improvements in wireless communications (cellular data, wifi, Bluetooth), battery technology and power management, cloud services, cameras, video compression, geolocation, AR. Let's not ignore the massive superiority of smartphone SoCs in performance-per-dollar or performance-per-watt metrics.
Sure a high-end PC will end up with higher scores than a premium smartphone but not when considering performance-per-watt.
And it's not just the hardware, it's also software innovation as well that is being driven by smartphones.
AI will be no different. Innovation will be driven on the smartphone. The future of AI isn't going to be what sort of LLM you can run on your power hogging RTX 4090, 5090, 6090, whatever. It'll be about doing stuff on your phone. E-mail/message composition and management. Photo and video editing. Things like auto captioning or tagging. Why do I need to manually tag a photo with my dog's name, AI should prompt me.
Hell, look at ChatGPT. Smartphone apps before desktop computing apps. There's still no native ChatGPT app for Windows, just macOS. But it's not AI, almost all of the OS innovation is on smartphones (partly driven by the rapidly changing hardware technology) whereas PCs fester year after year. PC CPUs with a generation-to-generation 15-20% uplift? PC GPUs with a similar improvement?
Even stuff like search is being made better by AI chatbots. Conventional Google and Bing search is full of SEO-optimized garbage or paid/promoted sites/services. Although still pretty rudimentary AI chatbots are cutting through a lot of this cruft that didn't exist 15 years ago.
And the PC industry has changed massively. I owned an Apple iBook in 2002, my first notebook computer. Twenty-two years later, notebook PCs pretty much do the same thing. And unlike 25 years ago, notebook computers dominate PC sales in 2024, maybe over 80% (it's over 85% for Macs). I have a notebook PC for personal use. It goes weeks unused; it's mostly a travel device but I only fire it up because I have to, not because I want to.
Apple didn't launch the iPhone until 2007 and now smartphones are ubiquitous and have changed the way people use technology on a daily basis. You look at the way young people use technology. The average American teenager is on their smartphone about 4 hours a day, and about 2 hours on TikTok.
And a lot of the phone driven innovation precedes smartphones. The Japanese started using their phones as transit passes in 2005. They were featurephones back then but the NFC IC chip in the JR Suica card was put into phones and people waved them at fare gates. The Japanese also invented emoji to enrich mobile communications. In the late 2000s/early 2010s Japanese designed phones gained water resistance (enough to survive a quick dunk), long before smartphones gained that protection.
Even today, NFC contactless payment via IC card (Suica, Pasmo, etc.) in Japan blows doors over Apple Pay. And now people use their smartwatches for this stuff. Almost none of the payment convenience features that people are so used to today have any importance on PCs. All my daily banking is done on my phone. It has been probably 6-7 years since I paid a credit card bill via a computer.
Anyone who thinks that desktop PCs are the bleeding edge of personal technology innovation in 2024 has their head in the sand. On the enterprise side, everything is being driven by datacenter innovation which is why Nvidia is raking in the big bucks.
PCs will always have a place in Joe Consumer's life but it's an increasingly smaller set of tasks with each passing month. It's amusing to see discussion threads like "I'm buying a new computer and will do some light video editing, will this system handle it?" Well, teens have been shooting and editing 4K skateboarding videos on their smartphones for almost ten years (iPhone 6s had 4K@30fps recording in 2015).
For almost everyone under 30, the PC is something you have to use (apart from gaming) because your employer or school tells you to. Otherwise everything else is pretty much done on the smartphone. This is even more pronounced outside of the USA.
AnandTech was a victim of its own myopic vision of reporting computing technology in 2024. Offering the occasional PSU or CPU cooler review isn't viable anymore. They stayed their original course and thus sailed off into never never land.
AnandTech won't be the last either. I expect other PC tech media sites to fold in the next few years especially if they continue wearing blinders and mostly just focusing on desktop PC hardware. I already see some other sites whose article output has dropped to a trickle.
But it's still sad to see them shut down for real. I got into PCs around 2008 so I remember their Radeon HD 4870 and "The Dark Knight: Intel's Core i7" Nehalem reviews being something I enjoyed reading even though I couldn't spend that much at the time.
Obviously he couldn't say anything at the time he left but clearly he was not happy with his situation at AnandTech at the time. Like I wrote earlier, the best and brightest are often the first to leave.
I often take note of braindrain -- usually silently. There's always some churn in every industry (and more so in high tech, especially in Silicon Valley) but too much of it is often a red flag. I've seen it in recently in a couple of high profile companies so of which are publicly traded.
As I have mentioned time and time again these corporate consolidations are pretty bad in any industry (not just tech media) for everyone except shareholders. But just blaming "corpo overlords" just sounds like tinfoil hat B.S. It was AnandTech's unwillingness to charge to the interests of modern tech news audience.
Hollywood doesn't make movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's or Roman Holiday anymore. There's a reason for that. I wish they would but my desires aren't going to fill movie theater seats. AnandTech didn't fill enough seats. They mostly kept singing the same tune and there weren't enough fans of the old style that kept them afloat.
Like I said, AnandTech is not alone in wearing blinders. There are other organizations (and not just tech media) that have similar changes in addressing the changing tastes of modern audiences. Traditional performing arts (symphonies, opera companies, ballet companies, etc.) are all trying to figure out how to get young audiences through the front doors.
The NFL got an angel when Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce but there are plenty of other professional sports league administrators who are praying for such a miracle.
Maybe AnandTech would still be around if they started making TikToks. That sounds sacrilegious but hey AnandTech is no more. I have no fondness for TikTok myself but AnandTech was a business. And as a business, their primary responsibility is to increase shareholder value. AnandTech did not fulfill their responsibility in the past few years.
No one can please everyone all the time but AnandTech clearly didn't please enough people in the past few years. This wasn't the readership's fault. If I run a coffee shop and don't offer non-dairy milk alternatives, some customers will eventually go to other businesses that offer these.
If you are still prattling about chips and sockets, tower CPU coolers, and ATX PSUs while much of the world has moved to notebooks, tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches, well, what should you expect?
Social media sites have replaced tech websites is the main thing. All that stuff people do on their phones is enabled by the cloud.
Andrei Frumusanu ended up at ... need we guess?
And I agree about TechPowerUp being the best written tech site left.
The reviews are great, and I've been a big fan of their CPU and GPU DB's for some time.
I'm more disappointed that people think that influencers are a more reliable sources than websites that have almost double or triple the years of experience that These "influencer's" have.
nvNews, HardPCP and 2cpu.com. Sites with savvy information, details, and equally savvy members.
leaving this site and Servethehome.com - not much else out there with intelligent forum members.
A real brain drain of good sites, forums, and contributors.
Sad to see Anadtech go
So sad
I still remember my early days as a reviewer, sending an email to Anandtech for a freelance job and receiving a reply from Anand himself. I was so excited. Back then, Anandtech was the top IT review site. It started operating in 1997 and was well known for its in-depth reviews. The current owner of Anandtech, Future PLC, which also has Tom’s Hardware, decided it was time to shut it down for its reasons. In its “Farewell” announcement, Anandtech’s Editor in Chief, Ryan Smith, mentioned that some people working for Anandtech will continue on Tom’s Hardware. Still, since I also worked on the latter site for several years, I know firsthand that the budget for in-depth reviews is limited. This was also why I quit Tom’s Hardware and started my media.
Unfortunately, as Ryan mentioned in his post, written tech journalism is not as popular as it used to be, actually far from it. YouTube, TikTok, and other media platforms have gained vast popularity over the last few years. Let’s face it and speak the bare truth. People, especially the new generations, got lazy and don’t want to read stuff. They want to see it on video. It is more convenient for them, and since video can also provide entertainment, it is more digestible. Deep analytic articles are only for the few ones, and even those might not fully understand it.
I cannot hide it. I am very sad to see one of the oldest sites, Anandtech, shutting down, but in this fast-paced world, if you don’t adapt, you die. We all have to adapt, one way or another. I also strongly believe there is still room for well-written tech journalism, especially since some product categories look better in written form rather than a video (e.g., PSU reviews).
Farewell, Anandtech, and a big thanks for your work!
Ryzen 5 3600 review, where it probably first appeared
Ice Lake SP review, with more detailed description of how it works
Zen 5 review, with serious issues - I'm sure the author would have solved them but he ran out of time.