Apple Closing Community Support Forum
Apple (Hacker News):
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’s not totally clear, but I take this to mean that they’re deleting all the data on November 20.
Apple informed MacRumors that it decided to sunset the Apple Support Community after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.
That’s clear as mud. Like most forums, there was a lot of useless and even wrong information, but there were also gems not posted anywhere else. It seemed like AI had the potential to make finding them easier. The forums were often more helpful than Apple’s own support people, who would claim to have never heard of an issue before even though there was a thread about it with hundreds of replies. They often gave me wrong information, too.
Alternatives to the Apple Support Community include the MacRumors Forums and Reddit, and customers can continue to contact Apple Support.
The good news is, AppleInsider will continue to offer detailed articles on how to solve any problem, plus you can use our forums to ask for help from our staff and many knowledgeable forum members.
See also: TidBITS Talk and Mac Power Users Talk.
If you have ever had a question or ran into a problem with an Apple product, chances are you have come across the Apple Support Community, the company’s official discussion forums where users from around the world help each other troubleshoot issues and share tips.
The platform has a history dating back to at least 1998, when it was known as Apple Tech Exchange. Since then, it was renamed Apple Discussions before relaunching as Apple Support Communities in April 2011, with a redesigned interface, personalized profiles, and a reputation system that rewarded users for helping others.
It’s unknown how many users the forums had, but even today, the portal still boasts that the Apple Support Community was “the world’s largest community of Apple fans.”
The problem with Apple Support Communities, in the opinion of many Apple users, was that the answers found on the forums were often lackluster, incomplete, or sometimes just downright wrong.
Many queries also often went unanswered, or the only replies to a tech support query were along the lines of “I’m having the same problem.”
[…]
Asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Apple’s new Siri AI how to resolve your Apple problem is often the quickest way to get a reliable answer now.
But weren’t those in part trained using the community forums?
One obvious issue with the forums would be the same one encountered by every company operating such a site: The owner has responsibility for the content without having control over it. If news of a hardware problem breaks, forum users will discuss it in a way that carries consequences for Apple’s corporate strategy, potentially widening awareness before the company is ready to release a statement or even seeding misinformation, and disgruntled device owners are unlikely to follow Apple’s desired messaging lines when complaining about the latest thing that has gone wrong.
[…]
In other words, Apple probably didn’t like the idea of owners googling a problem with their device, seeing the forums in a prominent search ranking and with official Apple branding, and then being exposed to unofficial messaging. It’s a company which is notorious for wanting to control the narrative at all times, and forums are a terrible medium for that.
I’m guessing that Apple sees this as more of a liability than an asset—when something controversial pops up (such as iPhone Duo displays failing), it’s a bit odd to be hosting the venue that makes you look bad. On the other hand, losing a potential space that isn’t Reddit is a little disappointing, even if it didn’t always fulfill the promise when it was set up 28 years ago.
These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way.
But they weren’t, nor were they helpful. They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help. I can’t tell you how many times I visited these forums while trying to track down the answer to a peculiar quirk or bug, only to find the (legitimate!) question being shut down by an officious high-ranking know-it-all who didn’t actually understand what was being asked and couldn’t provide a useful answer.
I am surprised by how abrupt this is.
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.
I cannot believe they’re going to nuke all that historic information. It’s not like keeping it online costs more than a rounding error on their balance sheet.
One reason for that could well be that, according to AppleInsider sources, Apple hasn’t even been reading those forums for at least the last five years.
That’s a problem. Apple should have been reading its own forums and also other online forums like Reddit.
Apple sits back like fucking dummies, ignoring problems that everyone knows exist because nobody bothers to fight through the red tape of supplying Apple with the required information including sysdiagnose and TPS reports via Feedback Assistant.
Previously:
- iPhone Duo Crackgate
- Reddit to Remove RSS
- AI AppleCare
- Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In
- Stack Overflow Changes Data Dump Process
- Redesigned Apple Developer Forums
- Apple to Drop Customer Support via Social Media
- Apple Support Community Forums
- Apple Store Removes Customer Reviews
- Apple Shutting Down Developer Mailing Lists
