At the end of August 2024, Anandtech shut down rather suddenly and unexpectedly, ending a run that dated back to April 3, 1997. I thought about writing something at the time, but really needed longer to collect my thoughts. Now that a year has passed, I think it’s time.
I drifted in and out of the site’s target audience for the whole time it was operating. Anand was a teenager when he launched it. Meanwhile, I had just started my IT career. For the next 27+ years, it was either a site I visited every day or twice a year, depending on what was going on in the industry, in my career, or my interests at the time.
I’m sure it was an amazing experience to be a teenager at the time Anandtech launched and grow up along with him and his site. But it was also an amazing experience to be a teenager in the late 80s and see the transition from 8 bits to 16 bits to 32 bits in such a short period of time, and to be in college while the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. We grew up in different but still interesting times, times that in most regards were interesting in the good way. And at the risk of sounding too much like a boomer, times that were better than today.
How Anandtech helped my career
For me, in the early days, Anandtech helped me keep track of the CPU alphabet soup that was going on. Being a teenager, he was trying to get the most for his limited budget. Working for a cash-strapped university IT department, I was also trying to get the most from a limited budget. I might read one of his CPU reviews and come to a very different conclusion about whether I could use that CPU, but he gave me all the information I needed to come to the conclusion I needed, which was great.
A decade later, I was keenly interested in SSDs. Anandtech was the first hardware site to do a good job of explaining why some SSDs were so much better than others circa 2008 or 2009. Today SSDs are mainstream and by 2008 standards all modern SSDs are great. Talking with other computer enthusiasts and IT professionals circa 2009, I was used to hearing very vague statements like, “SSDs are only good for some things and really bad for others.” Thanks to Anandtech, I knew that all SSDs were much worse at random writes than anything else. But some SSDs were better at random writes than traditional hard drives while others were worse. If you bought one that was better, you’d have a great experience.
As time wore on, I had less and less reason to read Anandtech regularly. But one thing has remained clear. I talk to IT and security professionals every day. And I can tell pretty quickly whether I’m talking to someone who has a good grasp of how computer hardware works or not. I think it’s sites like Anandtech that helped the people who do understand this stuff get that way.
Why Anandtech shut down
But times are changing. Web traffic is way down. Search engines used to be an excellent source of traffic. But by 2024, they kept eight times more traffic to themselves than they passed on to web site operators. The AI bubble means things are going to get worse in the near term. I think AI is a bubble like the dotcom bubble, but there’s no way to know when it will burst and what the post-AI bubble times are going to look like.
But here and now, lack of traffic means lack of ad revenue, and lack of ad revenue means it’s hard to pay writers. And I’ll dare say there was less interest in high-end computer hardware in 2024 than there had been in, say, 2004 or 1997.
So while Anandtech shutting down made me sad, I see why they had to do it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
You wrote, “I think AI is a bubble like the dotcom bubble, …” here. Writing your thoughts on that would be an interesting article in itself.