The elephant cemetery
It's official, Anandtech is no more: it will disappear after 27 years of loyal service. The site managed to survive the departure of its founder, who created it at the age of 14, to work at Apple. This is not the only site specializing in in-depth hardware testing that has disappeared in recent years. In France, the famous hardware.fr site disappeared in 2018 (site on which, I must admit, I spent far too much time trolling in the forums, I apologize, there is a statute of limitations…). More recently, the DPReview site died, then resurrected, in 2023.
The primacy of software
For several years, hardware developments have gradually slowed down. The time of the GHz race for PC processors is long gone (a little thought for my AMD Duron 700 that I pushed beyond GHz, it didn't like it). Gone are the days when we spent hours dissecting technical data sheets and reading tests to know which version of processor we should buy, if having 1MB of cache memory was profitable compared to 512KB.
Lately, after years where improvements from one version to another of smartphone CPUs were substantial, they have almost become anecdotal. What makes the difference today are mainly the new features brought by the applications and the operating system. The hardware serves the software and is of little interest in itself.
Apple and its horror of technical specifications
Steve Jobs didn't like purely technical information (except when it was to Apple's advantage…). He preferred to show what the product could do rather than list numbers at random. When he showed the iMac for the first time in 1998 (from which the latest iMac borrowed the idea of its colors), he spent very little time on pure technique (barely two minutes in the keynote).
And for good reason: its hardware is similar to the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One released a few months earlier (and which itself is very ugly, so much so that it will be given the nickname “Molar Mac” because of its shape reminiscent of a molar).
Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One ou Molar Mac
On the other hand, Steve Jobs will never stop dwelling on its innovative design, saying in this regard that his iMac has a more beautiful back than the front of all the computers on the market. Pressing on its all-in-one design, it demonstrates how easy it is to use with its simplicity. To do this, Apple will produce a video showing a seven-year-old child, helped by a dog, using the iMac for the first time in front of a 26-year-old student (MBA holder, etc.) using an ordinary PC. Result: the child managed to use the iMac and connect it to the Internet well before the student was able to start his PC.
And it works. Despite its hardware which is nothing exceptional, the iMac will be a huge success which will help save the company. However, to show that the iMac is still capable, Steve Jobs will make a comparison on video playback instead of comparing the amount of RAM or bus speed.
Along the same lines, when Steve Jobs presented the very first iPod in 2001, he insisted that it made it possible to have 1000 songs in your pocket. Of course, it will list the supported audio formats and the fact that the hard drive had a capacity of 5GB, but the message that will remain is the phrase: 1000 songs in your pocket. This will also become the very first slogan of the iPod, differentiating it from flash memory MP3 players and portable CD players.
The market has changed
Except for the market of gamers and professionals such as video editors or graphic designers, the technical specifications of PCs today are more than sufficient for classic office use. In fact, the general public does not have a real need to find out about the equipment, they are mainly looking at a single factor: the price.
Moreover, technology journalism has evolved a lot for about ten years. Computers, and especially smartphones, have become democratized at breakneck speed. Thus, advertisements for computer equipment, which were displayed mainly on specialized sites, ended up deserting them to prefer more general sites and social networks. In addition, the incessant changes to the Google search engine algorithm have gradually brought less traffic to specialized sites and more to more general public sites or social networks. The result is simple: specialized sites gradually had less and less advertising, and therefore money.while their articles were often long and interesting and always took more time to write. Add to that the public's demand for more photos, analysis and video and costs have skyrocketed. Finally, this has not improved recently with the new generative AIintegrated into the Google search engine, which summarize the article without the user even having to click on the link, preventing them from displaying advertising and depriving the sites of income.
