Fare Thee Well, Anandtech

If you're a long-time PC enthusiast like me, you're probably familiar
with the website Anandtech. Focused on computer technology, it was a
once-popular site where you could get good reviews on various bits of
hardware and software, ranging from monitors to keyboards to CPUs. It
was an invaluable resource when building your own PC, since it
provided detailed overviews of all the latest tech-toys, complete with
real-world benchmarks, that sites aimed at less tech-sophisticated
readers (ZDNet, CNN) never bothered with.

So it's with sadness that I learned that, as of today, Anandtech is
closing shop. It feels like the ending of an era.

Although to be precise, the website isn't going away. Rather, it just
won't get any new reviews or articles. Existing content (and the
forums) will remain active.

But I totally understand why Anandtech is shuttering; once darlings of
the early web, tech websites are just not profitable anymore. The
advertising dollars aren't there, and people have little desire to
read ten-page in-depth reviews about the latest-n-gratest video cards
anymore. The people who frequent those websites are declining in
number as they age out. And the sort of articles Anandtech specialized
in were expensive to produce, requiring a lot of time and
specialization to complete.

Gog knows I'm not immune from the lure of simpler articles too (yes, I
see the irony); it's been a long time since I've regularly read
Anandtech myself. Even when I built my PC last year, I only skimmed
its front page. And I'm the sort of target audience Anandtech was
built for!

Still, it pains me to see yet another detail-oriented tech website go
under whilst the personality-focused likes of LinusTechTips rakes in
hundreds of millions of dollars.

But I guess it was a good run (27 years) and its articles were -and
still are- incredibly useful to PC builders. Thanks for the memories,
Anandtech, and may your writers find success in all their future
endeavours!