End of the Road: An AnandTech Farewell:
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.
[...] 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. So that all of the content we've created over the years remains accessible and citable. Even without new articles to add to the collection, I expect that many of the things we've written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long.
The AnandTech Forums will also continue to be operated by Future's community team and our dedicated troop of moderators. With forum threads going back to 1999 (and some active members just as long), the forums have a history almost as long and as storied as AnandTech itself (wounded monitor children, anyone?). So even when AnandTech is no longer publishing articles, we'll still have a place for everyone to talk about the latest in technology – and have those discussions last longer than 48 hours.
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. There are a couple of familiar AnandTech faces already over there providing their accumulated expertise, and the site will continue doing its best to provide a written take on technology news.
[...] 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."
[...]
-Thanks,
Ryan Smith
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ingar on Sunday September 01, @08:04AM
Dr Ian Cutress has some interesting commentary [youtube.com] on this.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01, @08:06AM (5 children)
(add your own suggestions)
https://chipsandcheese.com/ [chipsandcheese.com]
https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tools/table [rtings.com]
https://www.rtings.com/mouse/tools/table [rtings.com]
https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/tools/table [rtings.com]
https://www.rtings.com/laptop/tools/table [rtings.com]
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/table [rtings.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday September 01, @10:03AM (4 children)
This was moderated as Spam because, to be honest, it looks more like a commercial page than anything else. I do not believe that the moderation was malicious. It does not replace the regular reports and stories that were published by AnandTech. I have given you the benefit of the doubt and removed the Spam mod (which could block your IP address) and I have replaced it with Redundant.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ingar on Sunday September 01, @10:32AM (1 child)
I modded it as spam, because while the chips and cheese link is relevant, the others are clearly trash, making this post 83% junk.
That is well above my spam threshold.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday September 02, @01:13AM
Mea Culpa...I got hung up and went to the wrong place...now I can't even find out where I went. The latter links will not render in my browser.
Now I see why you guys modded it as such. It quite pleased me that you undid a goofup on my end.
Promise I will be more careful...and quite pleased the checks and balance system here works.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01, @05:52PM
Yet because one of the child posts is at +2 the offending post remains visible despite being having a -1 rating. :(
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02, @01:14AM
Regarding spam: how many sites are blocked by your adblocker when you visit the rtings pages? For me it's zero (but my DNS settings might block some ad sites too).
Regarding redundancy: how many other sites do multi key latency tests?
https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/1-3-1/graph/23198/multi-key-latency-graph/corsair-k65-pro-mini-vs-microsoft-bluetooth-keyboard/41337/1823 [rtings.com]
There aren't that many who test lag/latency for monitors or mice either:
https://www.rtings.com/mouse/tests/control/sensor-latency [rtings.com]
https://www.rtings.com/mouse/tests/control/latency [rtings.com]
https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/inputs/input-lag [rtings.com]
If you're not a gamer they do slightly more objective text clarity tests too: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/picture-quality/text-clarity [rtings.com]
It's definitely better and more useful than Anandtech's end stage stuff.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday September 01, @10:03AM (2 children)
It's always a sad day when anything you have become attached to ceases to exist.
I remember how I felt when my old workplace ceased to exist, and I knew I would likely never see my colleagues again. Not all my tools or all the things I had built during my tenure there.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday September 01, @10:25AM (1 child)
That's the misery of time: the more it flies, the more you feel like losing what was once part of your life. And it gets way worse when you get old enough to lose people who are dear to you. Take it from me.
The trick is to make sure you always keep your present life full of nice things and nice people. Many people make the mistake of growing old with their memories and nothing else to replace them.
I try do that, but still I got caught in a nasty bout of nostalgia because of Slashdot a few months ago: their login page was broken and I couldn't log back in. It kept saying "User not found". So I figured that's it, I lost my 25-year old Slashdot account (and of course, the email I set it up with is long gone). But all the computers where I was still logged in kept working. So I basically said my farewells and prepared to be slowly kicked off Slashdot as my various logged-in browsers reset their Slashdot cookies.
Turned out, it was just a bug and my account is still there. But the feeling of losing that little shard of my past felt awful. Strange eh? 🙂
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday September 02, @02:24AM
I just realized, from your post, that I haven't received a Slashdot daily mailer since.... [looking] this past Mayday (how appropriate), tho the login email is still good, 26 years later. However, I see that without JS, I can no longer comment.
Ya know, while one of your browsers is logged in, you could go into your settings and change your email....
Well, things are better over here anyway.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Sunday September 01, @03:45PM (1 child)
Don't believe the above statement. While it will likely be true for some time, there will come a time in the future where some bean counter does this comparison:
(income from ad impressions) - (cost of hosting content)
And finds a negative value, and the bean counter will proceed to management explaining that they are "losing money here", and these group of managers will not contain any of the existing managers who, today, promised to "keep it alive indefinitely". And so the new group of managers will say: "hmm, you are right, lets shut that down" -- and disappear from the internet the content will.
Best to archive a copy of it now, just to be safe for when that day in the future arrives.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Monday September 02, @01:30AM
Here is the other site I used to be on a lot, as I used to work in this industry, and somehow it still survives to this day.
http://theoildrum.com/special/archives [theoildrum.com]
I was known as "hardhat" there, as at that time I nearly always wore one. We had so many interesting discussions there about where we were going to get the energy to keep everyone fed. A lot of stuff we discussed is now playing out, and in a way, I am relieved to know I won't be around for the finale.
We tried...but finance trumps all until we reach a hard stop that money can't buy us out of.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]