On Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:21:24 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

If you're a long-time PC enthusiast like me, you're probably familiar
with the website Anandtech.

The owner sold it and ducked out about a decade ago, it was pretty
good while it lasted but nothing like that ever lasts after the
founder sells out, so maybe the real news is that it lasted a full 10
years under the same owner as Tom's Hardware.

I bought the PC I primarily game on in 2018, 4 years after I bought my
previous "beefy" gaming rig in 2014. The 2014 rig is a music
production rig now, still going strong and so is this one. And
honestly, the difference in games between the 2014 rig and the 2018
one was actually a bit disappointing, despite both specs being best of
breed at the time. I can remember upgrades to gaming PCs bringing
exciting performance differences... in many cases it made the
difference between a game feeling fluid and worth playing versus a
slideshowy mess.

But I think those days are gone and what we're seeing now is a
reflection of that. After technology plateaued to the point where
there were no longer exciting games, the industry went a little nuts
and decided to turn to politics as a way to get reactions out of
buyers and mask the fact that the games themselves mostly sucked.

There is an occasional gem here and there but for the most part unless
you need to play games at high resolutions for some reasons it's hard
to justify the current price of top-end gaming rigs when most new
games suck anyway, and anything less than top end doesn't offer a
compelling upgrade over a 6 year old PC.

With all of that taken into consideration it's easy for me to
understand how a site like Anandtech found it difficult to survive.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 30/08/2024 20:21, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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!

It's been many years since I last read a tech. site as I've pretty lost interest in knowing what's the latest and greatest. Now the nearest I
get to it is when I decide to do a system refresh and even that's
limited to some basic google searches and then seeing what I think will
do the job in my price range and then just a quick additional check to
make sure it really will play the type of games I play.

The days when a system refresh meant what might be thought of as some
actually research into what to buy have long passed.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)