alt Hacker NewsThe Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026
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The value of a product community forum is proportional to the technical abilities of its users.
The Apple and Microsoft community support forums may have had more value years ago when the only people who knew how to find and use a forum were already technical. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when making an account on a site to talk to other people was unusual for average people.
Today, the only useful community support forums I visit are for highly technical products. Anyone participating has a baseline level of competency to even get into the software or hardware, so conversation quality is higher.
The Apple (and Microsoft) community forums almost always have a 12–page thread of people having my same issue and no solution. There is also the strange phenomenon of the community members who want to be very helpful but are only copying and pasting “have you tried turning it off and back on again” or “wipe your device and reinstall” non-solutions.
I’m surprised the Apple community forums lasted this long. I can remember a couple solutions I found there, but most of my visits were frustrating experiences of clicking through pages of threads of people complaining about the same thing. Even when someone did post a solution, it could get lost in infinite posts from users who didn’t know how to use a forum but kept adding complaints to the thread.
I feel bad for the people who dedicated significant time to helping others there. I just pulled up a random page and there are users with tens of thousands of answers and profiles professing their love of all things Apple. Suddenly going read-only with no warning and killing it shortly after just seems like such a cold and abrupt way to end what was clearly some people's hobby and point of pride. I hope they at least do something to privately acknowledge the most helpful users beyond the boilerplate message.
A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved
My gosh I don't remember the last time I found anything useful on there. It feels like every response is someone telling OP that Apple doesn't read those forums, and directing them how to file feedback. Sad though to see Apple pull further away from their community.
I agree that many or even the majority of posts were not helpful.
But there were some long-lasting OS flaws and third-party app frictions where the workaround was helpfully posted on this site. As an example, every time MacOS updated, Sonos would stop working. Privacy & Security --> Local Network --> Toggle the permission for "Sonos" off. Wait. Toggle it back on. Fixed. (While doing this, you'll also notice Google's workaround of adding fresh entries here on each update of Chrome.) I think before Googling 'mac sonos stopped working' I checked if the Sonos app had permissions and the OS reporting that it did is how I got stumped. A Google search and 30 seconds in one of these threads later and I learned the truth about the toggle on state. It seemed like an embarrassing workaround to leave necessary for a year but Apple seemed to be okay with this solution mentioned here and no where else.
Additionally, some phrases that you knew existed inside Apple products (like app store URL parameters or a Safari feature flag maybe) you might search as "site:apple.com DisablePNGTransparency" and the only result would be on discussions.apple.com and, yes, you would groan that Apple hadn't bothered to document it and cringe as you prepared for the chaos you anticipated in the thread. But you still appreciated that you weren't the first user to be looking for information about the term, you hadn't dreamt it.
I wonder if Archive Team will care to scrape it before the 20th.
You could never get an actual engineer to reply on those threads anyway. Whenever I had issues with my iPhone, I always find links to this forum and get disappointed.
Good riddance. Every time I search for help and I find a link to one of these pages, it is the worst thing in the world. There is no useful information there whatsoever from what I can tell.
I was the product manager for answers.com some time ago. We had a similar community of "people who invest more time than is reasonable providing answers on the site" and those people are no doubt hurt and angry right now.
It’s just like the Microsoft forums: it’s stacked with trolls providing useless answers just to jack up some kind of score.
You rarely get good advice in these kinds of forums.
That forum was single handedly made relevant thanks to one person - Eskimo.
Sign of the times, but like the google forums, it's all "contact google support" / "contact apple support" with little insight outside of apple administrative policies.
I think this is a bad idea because these forums generated good training data.
I’ve been using Claude Code for weeks to debug an issue with my HomePod that kept turning on randomly. No results.
Finally tried a google search that pointed at these forums and the right solution. The touch interface was damaged and reacted randomly, so all I needed to do was to reduce the sensitivity.
Claude and Claude Code failed because they lacked the training data; they took me down a rabbit hole to monitor traffic going into my home network and tons of other stupid over engineered solution. Google search had the right training data.
Apple should leverage these forums, but they are too dumb to understand the capital value of this data.
Something like 20 years ago when I was living in NYC, I was invited to the Apple Store in Chelsea to take part in a panel about the forums with Apple staff. I hadn't used them in years, but I had a lot of posts with upvotes or whatever it was.
Anyway, I don't remember anything about the panel, but afterwards they took us to this swanky restaurant with a huge charcuterie spread and an open bar. I remember commenting to one of the other participants that the wine was like $20.00+ per glass, with a bit of a cringe. An Apple employee overheard me and was like "don't worry about it, this is all on Apple!"
Pretty sure I drank like $1000.00 worth of wine that night, and I remember ending up in a cab with some Apple staff members who were in town from California, but I'm not sure if we carried on after that.
If anyone from Apple is reading this, maybe we should all get together for a debriefing/lessons learned now that it's all shutting down?
Has anyone heard the real reason for this?
Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
It could be they ran Mythos on it, found a lot of bugs, and decided it wasn't worth patching.
I’ve rarely seen any useful answers that solve the problem on these forums. Most of them are helpful pointers to Apple’s support pages though. BUT, this was also a way for Apple to get a sense of the issues people were facing and how widespread some issues were. With LLMs now, Apple could’ve used the forums to glean a lot more information than before. It could have also shown relevant support page links while someone was composing a post (like what the StackExchange sites did a long time before LLMs).
Apple doesn’t seem to be serious on listening to customers though. In retrospect, the writing was on the wall for this forum to disappear when the Apple Seed discussion forums were removed without any notice or notification. That was a place to get a few Apple engineers and engineering liaisons to look at specific feedback reports.
It’s truly sad that a new CEO comes and Apple becomes even more walled off from its customers. Is Apple going to tie up with Reddit now, to know what its customers are asking or complaining about? This is a loss for Apple!
Relative to profits, this forum costs Apple pennies to run what the hell :(
There are so so many bugs in OS X and it's up to the users to ferret them out. Many years ago when I upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, my external Firewire drive suddenly wouldn't even appear as a device, Apple was of no help. Turned out that the Oxford Firewire chip inside of the drive (OX911, an ominous chip name) needed an update and thankfully there was a Java based updater that did the trick. I never would have found that out without the Apple Support Community.
Hope somebody clones the site but I see it's protected by anti-crawler software now, thanks scrapers.
That's good. Right now that site is just polluting search results with useless info. It used to be helpful back pre-2010s.
We need to spin up ArchiveTeam Warrior ASAP
What will feed the LLMs now? Apple is definitely seeing reduced support costs because chat agents have ingested all their support forums and can help answer questions.
The Developer Forums are great, and I've had direct responses from engineers to help fix my issues, and in the last few months too. It's alive.
The standard community forum, however, should have been put to sleep years ago, its only function is to clog up the internet with half-truths, unanswered problems, and outdated workarounds.
Shoutout to Quinn, who has made many incredibly helpful posts in these forums. Maybe some posts by others weren't as helpful, but Quinn's comments were great.
Have to be honest, not once have I ever found a solution to anything on that board. I generally consider it search engine junk when it comes up now.
I won't miss it.
Good. That place was a cesspit of wrong answers.
Does anyone know if this includes the Apple Developer Forums or only the consumer community? The dev forums are one of the few places you sometimes get an answer from someone at Apple. Losing those would hurt a lot more than this.
So the statement says:
> The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
It is unclear to me whether the "read-only state" is only what it currently is, or whether it will continue to be available read-only (for a while) into the future.
Presumably the folks at the Internet Archive will be grabbing what they can.
So the statement says:
> The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
It is unclear to me whether the "read-only state" is only what it currently is, or whether it will continue to be available read-only (for a while) into the future.
Presumably the folks at the Internet Archive will be grabbing what they can.
I'm pretty sad about this, so much knowledge is there and continues to be there. We can't rely on other 3rd party sites such as Reddit or Discord (even worse!) to store this data.
It's always been completely useless anyway. Never, EVER, got an answer from it.
I've been waiting 10 years for an answer to why we still don't have air quality data in so many countries, despite the fact that there are numerous data sources available worldwide. Even Apple provides this data.
Many times I needed some support on Apple products, Apple Support Community never helped me unfortunately. They almost always answer with vague answers like: "Make sure you turned on _this_ setting", "Make sure you restart the computer", etc. Sure, I might've had more complex problems, but it's not the place I would look for when I needed some kind of help with Apple products.
I miss Apple’s mailing lists. They were quite good back in the day.
The Developer Forums appear to be staying around (or at least there is no banner across the top of them, and they have not been put in read-only mode)
I don't understand, what am I supposed to search for now when I have a question? A lot of that stuff has been saved in scrapes and llms but pretty weird that they're just taking it offline?
Are they going to replace it with anything? Where will people discuss their Apple support issues?
Good riddance. Honestly, the only thing I remember about those forums was that they hijack the back keyboard shortcut so I had to reach for the button every time I misclicked on a thread there. Never found anything useful there about the problems I was researching.
Hmm, could spark the contributions on Ask Different for a brief while.
oh no, where will I go to have some Apple enthusiast give a confidently wrong answer to my technical question now?
just kidding, the Genius Bar is still open
good, can we kill the Microsoft one now? not every problem needs a new hardware driver and an sfc /scannow but that's what the community seems to have settled on for the last 15 years
Good. It's useless - completely, utterly useless except as some sort of anthropological meta-study of the many and varied ways tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places, the weirdos who apparently hang out there purporting to help them (and almost never doing so, except by accident) all downstream of a mega-corporation's Web 2.0 fever dream of not having to pay anything for customer support.
Now that I type all that out, I hope it's not completely deleted. Leave it to science.
Man, that handful of blessed dudes who spent decent portions of their lives and mental capital trying to earn "good karma" and up-votes on their freely delivered help and fixes.
Back to their workbenches, soldering irons in hand. Mac OS X 10.0 framed launch poster on the wall...
It was pretty much useless anyhow. Just some "power users" asking if you've done the 3 steps that aren't going to fix the issue from some apple support article telling you to turn it off and on.
If the fix was anything under the hood beyond a dedicated system settings toggle in the gui, it was not going to be mentioned or discussed in this forum. You weren't going to get your launchd questions solved here.
I never quite understood the shilling of Etrecheck for more than a decade, to then berating the person who asked.
If I need any help gemini is just fine. And for many real issues the forums were totally useless and essentially provided placebo-like actions that did nothing.
Example: "my iPhone's photo library won't sync." Here are 15 things to do that are pointless but might have worked once for someone 18 years ago.
Good? Every time I was looking to solve an Apple issue I ended up there and not once I found an answer. To be fair it's very similar to the Microsoft support forums, only difference people over there have badges.
I'm surprised there's a severe lack of moral outrage here...huh.
These forums were never helpful for me, random blogs, Reddit, and other forums (lol) have always been helpful.
Who knew families and communities closed ?
There needs to be a law something like false advertising that prevents dishonest misuse and misrepresentation of the words family and community.
This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.
Maybe when it started back in the late 90s it was a bastion of great information; however, I have never found a single answer that was worthwhile on there when landing from a search engine query.
If anything, this is likely flooding LLMs with incomplete/invalid/useless information and it's just time they deprecated it in favor of something more modern and useful.