Anand Lal Shimpi Retires From AnandTech

An anonymous reader writes: If you've built a PC in the past 17.5 years, chances are you read some hardware reviews on AnandTech at some point. The site's creator, Anand Lal Shimpi, has announced that he is retiring from the tech writing business. He said, "AnandTech started as a site that primarily reviewed motherboards, then we added CPUs, video cards, cases, notebooks, Macs, smartphones, tablets and anything else that mattered. The site today is just as strong in coverage of new mobile devices as it is in our traditional PC component coverage ... To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I've received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you."

Impressive

[The Raven]

Anand's consistent dedication to accurate and objective review metrics, as well as his crusade to put an SSD in every home computer, are both laudable. I hope the site will maintain the same lofty ideals without him at the helm.

Great Site But Hated the OCZ SSD Recommendations

[JakFrost]

Read the site since the beginning every time I needed an upgrade for components ever since Tom's Hardware sold out to its sponsors.

Anand and his writers were great and they changed the way that computer reviews were done online versus in magazine print in PC Magazine or Boot / Maximum PC.

His recommendation of OCZ products at every revision of the Vertex line of products deserves a black eye on his legacy though since the reports of failures of every Vertex line 1 through 4 were coming out consistently just a few months after release on sites like Newegg, HardOCZ, ExtremeSystems, Amazon, Overclokers, etc. Anand keep awarding Editors Choices to OCZ regardless of the volumes of failures.

He admonished Intel for their firmware bugs correctly but then white washed OCZ failures but back tracked and started mentioning their failures after it became common knowledge in the hardware circles.

Still he leaves a legacy for legitimate and notable online journalism that changed online reviews and reporting by legitimizing it and receiving sponsorship from manufacturers.

Wow

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I guess running tech sites ages you because he looks 50.

Remember his personal video reviews?

[kolbe]

Back in the 90's when places like SharkyExtreme.com, jc-news.com, HardOCP.com and Tomshardware.com were "it", Anand Lai made a name for himself for his more than truthful video reviews. It was a new take on things with this guy Anand, sometimes sitting on a rock outside, chatting about computers.

I still trust much of the content on his site, but worry it'll go the way of sharkyextreme now. Perhaps legitreviews or some other can fill that void without Anand around.

Thank you for helping millions of us make good choices over the years Anand, I wish you the best!

Re:Impressive

[Barny]

My PC is a gaming PC, OS and applications is about 1.1 TB of storage on it.

Also, here, $50 will not get you an SSD. For around $100 I can get a 80GB one, but anything over 100GB quickly rise to hundreds of dollars+.

accurate, thorough reporting?

[Ecuador]

Ok, I guess, as long as it is not an Apple product. If it is, then all that is thrown out of the window and the product is deemed "great" and worth the extra cost. This is most obvious in the smartphone sections. For example you can read the "android user on an iPhone 5S" article, and he lists all those important limitations of iOS that would definitely turn any Android user away, but says they are "temporary" and inexplicably concludes that iOS is not a worse experience. Similarly, supposedly they would test all important smartphone releases, however they review each iphone multiple times (seriously, check it out), then some popular Androids and that's it. They missed things like the N9, which was probably the best phone when it came out (as I had an iPhone, an Android and a N9 at the time), and don't try anything that could appear too price competitive to Apple devices (like Xiaomi). The Mac/Macbook etc reviews are similarly biased, the site seems to be in awe of Apple and everything they make. As an owner of a Mac Pro, a Mac Mini, 3 iPhones (all company provided) and the experience with them and all Apple products in our company, I am not similarly awed (I could write long stories here).
So, yeah, Anandtech, while it is not as good as it used to be, it is probably still (one of) the best (although for PSUs and an alternative take on GPUs you should look at HardOCP), but be wary of the Apple bias.

Repay? DF?

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything I owe him for all the help I've received over the years.

Re: Slightly pro-Intel reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Try it in Linux, go to phoronix.com and look at the AMD and Intel benchmarks on Linux. Since most Linux apps are not compiled with the sabotaged Intel compiler like windows, the AMD cpu is much more competitive.