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."

Comments

Many a purchase was based on his quality reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Anands In-depth quality reviews will be missed!

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.

Re:Impressive

[wolrahnaes]

Because SSDs are literally the best thing you can do for your computer's performance in desktop applications. Most of the time you're nowhere close to CPU limits and these days standard RAM levels are finally high enough that only the cheapest shitboxes hit swap in normal browsing/chatting/office type tasks. Everything is waiting on the slow old hard drive. Make that an order of magnitude faster and it shouldn't be a surprise that you can rejuvenate even an old computer.

My work laptop is a Dell Vostro from 2010 with a sub-2GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It runs circles around most of my customers' computers in day-to-day stuff even when they have Core i-series processors solely because it has enough RAM (8GB) and more importantly a SSD. It's not even a great SSD, just a cheap Kingston, but it makes a huge difference.

The correct answer for any new computer is a reasonable sized SSD for the OS and applications combined with a regular hard disk for larger stuff like media collections where random access time isn't as important. Only gamers really need to compromise, with so many games these days exceeding 10GB it's still too expensive for a lot of us to have our entire game collections on SSD, but in that case it's still not hard to just install whatever you play most to the SSD and put older/less commonly played titles on the HD.

Really hope the spirit lives on

[gman003]

AnandTech is pretty much the only tech site I trust implicitly anymore. They don't do bullshit stories, they don't rush things out just because everyone else is, and they aren't afraid to criticize their own sponsor's products. More to the point, they know their stuff, and they have brought a lot more science to testing. They don't even test cases with actual computers in them anymore, they use strictly-controlled thermal loads and lab-grade probes because it wasn't repeatable enough. Hopefully Anand's spirit of accurate, thorough reporting will live on at Anandtech for years to come, because if they fail I don't know of anyone that could replace them.

Re:Really hope the spirit lives on

[Anonymous Coward]

toms hardware was never the same after he invented myspace

Re:Slightly pro-Intel reviews

[MildlyTangy]

I personally think Anandtech does overtly good reviews of Intel CPUs. I think they never gave AMD a fair shot. Having said that I think it's one of the best resources for computer hardware reviews in addition to tomshardware, overclock.net.

AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5 . I know the truth hurts, but there you have it.

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.

Re: Slightly pro-Intel reviews

[wolrahnaes]

Uh......have you not noticed that AT has a full sponsored AMD section? They literally give AMD news special placement. The fact is, and I say this as someone whose only Intel processor is in his laptop, AMD performance sucks.

They're competitive usually on price to performance, but even the absolute top end 200+ watt 5GHz turbo AMD processor gets matched by mid-range i5s and stomped by i7s.

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!

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.

Re:Great Site But Hated the OCZ SSD Recommendation

[AbRASiON]

Your memory must be shabby.
He recommended OCZ SSD's when they were SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than the competition. They were the first non premium priced SSD with intel like performance and no huge latency spikes when writing small files.

Yeah look a lot of them failed, I got burnt by many of them - but at the time the failure rate issue wasn't widespread. They were the Celeron 300a of SSD's and so he rightfully pushed them.

And now will be working for Apple

[pjludlow]

Looks like his next job is confirmed to be at Apple, although what position is undisclosed. http://recode.net/2014/08/31/v...

Hired by Apple

[rhanoudi]

Looks like Apple hired him. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...