AnandTech Is Closing Down

Editor-in-chief Ryan Smith:

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.

Awful news. There was no publication like AnandTech before it was founded, and there’s been no publication like it since. To say that it will be sorely missed is a profound understatement. When founder Anand Lal Shimpi left the site to join Apple 10 years ago, I was pretty skeptical that AnandTech could maintain relevance, let alone excellence. But it did, in spades. I’d go so far as to say it barely missed a beat. This news of a shutdown is just a gut punch. The only good news in the whole announcement:

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.

Why every publisher shutting down a site doesn’t do this, I’ll never understand. I’ll leave the final words to Smith:

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.

Amen.

★ Friday, 30 August 2024