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Comment by elephanlemon | Hacker News Reader

Very sad, but Anandtech has been on a downslope since Anand left. Once that happened it seemed like they almost instantly went from publishing many times a week to only occasionally pushing out content, usually quite delayed. The quality was still very good though and I always tried to find an Anandtech review of whatever it was I was looking for. Did the publishers just cheap out and stop paying for enough articles? Or did people lose motivation when they found themselves working for a faceless corp instead of Anand?

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I don't blame the site for this, though. Anand got out at about the same time as marketing overtook technological improvement in product development (for the most part). I remember the very early days (I lived just a couple miles from Anand in the Raleigh area) where he was doing super in-depth assessments at the board & chip level, through the rapidly changing evolution of motherboards, CPUs & GPUs in the early 2000s ... but as everything basically became mostly commoditized and user experience differences have reduced even for home-built PCs (and the number of people still home-building PCs, period!), there just hasn't been a compelling reason to continue this depth of analysis or writing for the past decade or so.

> marketing overtook technological improvement in product development

I would say another key change is things just becoming less modular over time.

Like, the chipset used to be a major factor in choosing your motherboard, but it just doesn't matter anymore. Third-party chipsets are no longer a thing, and there's little difference between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a full integrated northbridge now.

And honestly, today's PCs are powerful enough that there's no point in even bothering to make optimal choices. You could pick mediocre parts for all your stuff and still end up with a beast. It's not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you'd feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.

True, while in the 90s/00s I used carefully built computers eventually I turned to laptops. Running a (powerful) 400+ Watts box that isn't mobile is very nice to have but won't really work for me anymore.

I must admit I therefore was only vaguely aware of the site. (During "my time" Tom's Hardware was quite a thing but probably they cater mostly to overclockers and gamers)

Would be nice to see a renaissance of DIY computing though. MacBooks do become a little bit boring :) On the other hand I do run a small homelab by now

> usually quite delayed.

I used to be a regular reader of AnandTech since the early 2000s and the delays are what drove me off the site. Specifically when the Nvidia GTX 1080 launched on May 27, 2016. The AnandTech review came out 2 months later on July 20, 2016. [1] I had no problem waiting a whole week, but after that it was getting ridiculous. They just didn't serve their readers.

After I found replacement reviewers, mostly on YouTube, for my in depth reviews, I never went back to regularly visiting AnandTech. Their time had already passed in 2016 as far as I'm concerned. Not only were they delayed, but their reviews weren't even the most in depth any more.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-...

Agree, but when Ian left a few years ago is when I ultimately stopped visiting all together.

Maybe unavoidable, but the level of ads covering the website also made it borderline unreadable...

What ads? Seriously, though, when Anand and Ian left was about the time the content started losing quality, the ads started increasing, and I removed the site from my adblocker's whitelist.

Around the year 2000 (don't remember exactly) there were 3 sites I checked daily: Anandtech, Tom's Hardware and XBit Labs. Since Anand and Thomas sold their sites the quality dropped enough that in the past few years I rarely opened any of these sites (except Xbitlabs that does not exist for a long time). In some way, Anand and Thomas were the souls that left the bodies.

Yeah, I also noted that. In 2014 Anandtech was acquired by the same company that ran Tomshardware, the two sites were among the most popular in their segment. I never shook off the feeling that after the acquisition it was left to die.

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