DavidGraham
Veteran
In a horrible horrible development, Ryan and the official twitter handle have announced that Anandtech is shutting down!
Like said in the article, despite closing AnandTech down Future will keep the site with it's current content online indefinitely and Forums will keep running with moderator team provided by Future.I hope someone there collects everything together and gives a copy to the internet archive, so this knowledge isn't lost forever.
Additionally, on the latter point, Anand and Brian’s coverage of smartphones and tablets was really amazing.This is just speculation obviously but it seems like a big catalyst issue was that they stopped doing GPUs from which they never recovered. From what I've heard the trigger point was possibly losing their GPU test equipment from California fires? If you're not doing GPU coverage it seems like that would be a huge loss of audience issue given the target demographic likely resulting in a funding spiral. The GPU writer (Ryan Smith) then having to pull double duty being new editor in chief with Anand leaving probably didn't help here resource wise. GPU coverage also at this point, especially in terms of gaming/consumer relevance, also seemed to moved on in terms of expectations.
The CPU coverage also while at a time more ground breaking in terms of depth likely lost lustre due to both alternative content and the writer leaving (Ian Cutress) and other content sites also going into some depth. Otherwise the CPU coverage wasn't really all that engaging for most consumers and I'd say behind the times now.
Anandtech also had something going for them in being early in SSD coverage and innovating there but that also seemed to have stopped once the writer (I think Billy Tallis?) left to work in industry? Now there's also a lot of compentent SSD coverage. There seems to be a trend here.
Great but can they be trusted to do it? How is it funded if it's from profits generated by Future what happens if they get into financial difficulties, what happens if they get a new ceo who decides they need to cut costs, which is why I'd like to also see an independent archive and also see them package the whole site into an archive so if they did close they could post "hey we are closing soon if you'd like to host a copy of our site we packaged it up into a single archive for you"Future will keep the site with it's current content online indefinitely and Forums will keep running with moderator team provided by Future.
You probably made a good point but TBH I got bored of reading by this point and moved on.Damned, I'm no longer into hardware or gaming, still every now and then I check the news and Anandtech was my go to website for news and analysis.
That site is a legacy part of the internet, when it was about sound discussion, knowledgeable people, respect and next to no marketing bullcrap.
I don't know them but I hope the team can rebound somehow, in that tik-tok era with people with a 30 seconds attention spams,