The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026

That forum has been useless for a long, long time. It needed weighted answers from the community and moderators to ban spammers and prevent sybil attacks.

I wonder if this will be a trend and we'll see Microsoft doing it next?

Did anyone ever actually get answers on that thing in the last several decades? Every question I've found there was someone asking a real question by someone who wants ownership of their devices, with an answer that boils down to "live with it, or contact Apple themselves if you can't", which shuts down the conversation real good. Hopefully now at least it won't pollute search results anymore?

Not surprising. Most of the information I’ve found on the forum is either obvious (to me), flat out wrong or else just a “yep we don’t support that”.

The tragedy here isn't that they are shutting down an ineffective community support site, it's that Apple doesn't have an effective community support site.

IME, it hasn't been 100% useless, but the great majority of the time it offers no help, or has enough misinformation to keep you misdirected for a while.

Why in the age of more and more slop in software development do companies close more and more avenues for getting feedback that could counter that a bit?

Oh no. Where will I go now to be told I'm doing it wrong, and asked, "Why would you even want to do that?"

This seems very sudden.

Could it be for cybersecurity reasons?

"Apple has confirmed to us that not only are the forums getting shut down, they're being taken completely offline." https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/11/11/apple-support-com...

are they going to be offering a dump of the data?

Finally.

I always found very generic response in the Apple Support Community honestly

> We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.

Why even offer this hollow patronizing comment?

If you want to thank them, actually thank them with some token of appreciation other than a single, anonymous passive-voice remark in an announcement banner when they go to login to help others.

In the early years of the support community. It wasn’t a terrible source for finding answers and troubleshooting common hardware and software issues.

But lately (as in past 5-6 years), it has just been a dumping ground for complaints, many results get ranked below better answers, and just generally wrong/outdated information (ie, applies to Mountain Lion, incorrect/missing commands).

Let's face it, most of the answers were non-answers by people trying to up their reply count. I have never ever found anything helpful in these forums and anything slightly negative towards Apple gets handwaved away by these "powerusers". It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum. Good riddance.

Link works just fine for those wondering if it's down already.

I'm glad they are shutting this down, I hope the also switch off the site entirely so search engines don't link to it. It was mostly junk with people posting anecdotal recipes for making things work. It may have been a useful place to find information maybe 15 years ago, but the SNR ratio even then was bad. Good riddance.

Link doesn't work, like everything Apple

Is this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?

"...and nothing of value was lost"

Apple support on the internet has a mountain of problems:

- Apple themselves don't properly support or document anything besides the absolute latest versions of their platforms. Even things from just a few years ago are almost impossible to find/troubleshoot/solution for. They often delete old documentation with prejudice as well.

- Apple products tend to attract a lot of technologically illterate people that somehow still manage to post on places like that forum. It results in a lot of worthless posts that say either nothing or provide inaccurate/false information.

- Clout chasers - Apple people like to be content creators and often ignore helping someone in favor of being famous. They clog up these forums.

- Pretentiousness - Also an Apple community issue. The "Daring Fireball" level of arrogance where replies may just be "buy a new one" or "you shouldn't do it that way because Apple says no"

All of these issues likely came to a head.

Easily one of the most useless cesspools on the internet. Over 30 years I’m not sure I ever found a single helpful answer on there. It was no better than Microsoft’s community support site, and that one was weird SEO spam 80% of the time.

Good riddance.

Apple works a lot like the regime in Iran: It goes miles to distance itself from its customers by keeping everything a secret, governing behind closed curtains, never talking like a human to the rest of the world and community; just repeating the same robotic marketing messages with exact same words back to people, showing products that bankrupts their most loyal indie developers without giving a damn, having hardcore circles of those who they engage and only on their own terms... And this is absolutely one of those things. This forum never saw a real contribution from Apple; people used to speculate and try to fix things on their own; without any keys to Apple's platforms. And not dismissing them and their work this easily says everything about Apple. It's like when they made the social network ping and let no one in; or how you can't put your song in Apple Music yourself because they only work with credible labels and whatever. This is not nice; but that is exactly why Apple works

Does Apple show any consideration for the users there? A thank you, some trivial compensation, a little time - why not shut down in January? Who shuts something down on a couple weeks notice?

The statements I've seen from Apple lack the slightest empathy. People put many hours into it for many years and obviously valued it. (Like many here I didn't find value in it but HN isn't 'normal' in that respect.)

Corporate America (maybe elsewhere too) has embraced contempt - the lack of empathy - for everyone but the truly powerful (large shareholders, etc.), including contempt for customers, employees, the community and public. That's sociopathic, not natural human behavior.

Of course, unless they get a negative reaction from the public - including via their democratic governments - they'll keep doing it.

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I wonder if there's a market for a public bug tracker to track things in say, Microsoft Teams, that then goes and doxxes the person at the company who's on the team that could actually fix it. Or trying to get hired by that company so you can go in and fix that bug and then quit.

There are so many people who have their identities wrapped in that forum… just look at their post signature blocks.

The problem with forums is that 20 year olds don't have the patience to use them- and that is even assuming they can read.

And yeah I know just ask AI9000 but guess where it gets the answers from...