Nearly a year ago, we shared the news that Anandtech was being snuffed out by its publisher, Future, after being left to slowly rot from a lack of investment as its other brands seemed to be more worth their while. at the time, Future publicly stated that the site would remain available indefinitely, but much like T-Mobile’s idea of a price lock guarantee, they had their fingers crossed behind their backs while uttering those words.
For those of you unfamiliar with Future, they have a portfolio of sites that they’ve hoovered up via acquisition over the years including Tom’s Hardware, PC Pro, Android Central, Windows Central, PC Gamer and TechRadar. When attending trade shows like Computex and CES, I’ve yet to find a tech journalist fond of the Future empire and how it is run.
What we’re seeing now is https://www.anandtech.com is redirecting all traffic over to the Anandtech forums at https://forums.anandtech.com over the past few days. No notices have been posted, but there’s been some level of unsurprised chatter in the various communities that we’re involved in. Dr. Ian Cutress also acknowledged that a year of continued site availability was the original plan and Future appears to have rounded that down by a month.
Whether this is a temporary blip while they get the squirrels out of the attic and the site stood back up or if it’s a permanent snuffing a la The Inquirer (RIP), we’ll hopefully find out soon. Of course, Ian’s Anandtech closing video continues to provide good insight into its final years and his take on it – certainly worth a watch if you didn’t catch it the first time around.