State of the Hardware Asylum Address 2025

Back in the days of Ninjalane I would post a little something in the Forums about what I had planned for the coming year along with some details abut what went right and what was a total failure.  Strangely enough, the last one of these I posted was in 2021 and by all accounts that was a pretty good year followed by some letdowns.  I don’t want to dwell too much on the past but, we lost some great brands since then.  EVGA stopped making NVIDIA based graphics cards, Anandtech shutdown and the effects of “The Situation” can still be felt across the industry despite what the analysts tell you.

In 2024 I was able to attend both CES and Computex.  Maybe it was the lack luster showing of products of just me being grumpy but, I found neither of these events all that exciting.  Computex was especially disappointing, it had been four years since I was in Taiwan last, got soaked waiting in line to see the NVIDIA keynote, discovered my favorite hotel had been torn down to build a new modern apartment building and there were all new people at familiar companies making the ROI extremely poor. 

On top of that I also got food poisoning, which was a first after fourteen trips to the tiny island.

I still feel that Computex is THE show for any PC Hardware Writer to attend and while my coverage of trade shows has changed considerably there is still plenty to see and new contacts to be made.  Unfortunately, the Computex trade show has also changed.  The popular booth girls have all gone away (for quite some time now) and the larger venue has given companies more space to expand but, not really in a good way.  For instance, the booths vary depending on the purpose.  Many smaller companies who are there to generate sales contacts will have lots of products on display while larger companies will only show “favorable” products despite the booth being huge.  When space was at a premium there was more creativity in the overall booth design and how the companies would attract visitors.

A good example of this is ASUS, their booth(s) at Computex where split between retail and commercial and both were standing room only.  This was great, and it was fun walking around but, very few products were things I cared about and made it difficult to get excited about anything.  Another prime example was ASRock who had a number of motherboards on display and nobody around to monitor the wall to answer questions or, marketing folk to accept media contacts.  In both instances their efforts were focused on mainstream platforms and AI despite there being a few hidden gems in remote corners of the booth.

What is happening in 2025

Podcast
The first item on the list is the continuation of the Hardware Asylum Podcast.  It would seem that Darren and I still enjoy recording the show and looking at the download numbers plenty of people are listening.  Scheduling aside we aren’t planning any format changes.

I still believe that the Hardware Asylum Podcast is one of the best if not THE best show out there dedicated to enthusiast PC activities.  Unfortunately, promoting a Podcast isn’t easy and while I find it best to have listeners promote the show, I discovered early on that few listeners are into sharing and when you ask them to, they get offended like you slashed their tires and kicked their cat.

With that said, the show appears to be growing and if that continues, we will find time to deliver more awesome content.  You can find the podcast here on Hardwareasylum.com, iTunes, Google Music, Spotify and Amazon.  You can also find it on shady sites looking to make money from my hard work by linking to my audio files, not offering links back to Hardware Asylum and hosting ads on every page.

Go subscribe already.

Website Changes
When I launched Hardware Asylum back in 2012 it was a bit of an experiment.  The domain had been previously used by a former “fly by night” hardware reviewer that never really did much.  I liked the name and figured it would be a good name to rebrand under.  Ninjalane is still my company name, my email address is still @ninjalane and I hope to bring that website back with some retro projects.

I do have plans to migrate over the rest of the Ninjalane articles and de-publish the ones from previous reviewers that I had writing for me.  It is no offence against them but, the content isn’t viable anymore and may conflict with my future plans.

With the article migration I also plan a slight redesign of the Hardware Asylum UI.  I’ll be adjusting the template to be a little wider to match the modern design trends and tweaking the font sizes to match.  Since the launch of Ninjalane v3 the base color scheme has been white, and whlie I find this to be a good balance I’m thinking about offering a black version with maybe a $1 dollar Patreon donation.  Twill see if that works out.

As for Ninjalane, this will become my new home for retro projects.  Currently, these have been posted to the YouTube channel with follow-up articles on Hardware Asylum under the Retro and Asylum Vault categories.  With this switch I will be able to promote the Ninjalane Labs BBS and start the Asylum Vault project. 

More on that later.

Conclusion
Once again I am hoping for another great year at Hardware Asylum and with any luck my plans can be realized.  The challenge will be to step up where others failed or finally recognize the “Sickboy unifying theory of life”.