Apple is killing its Support Community forum next week
theverge.com
theverge.com
But yeah I’ve never found a decent answer to anything there, mostly just “I dunno try this” or “do that thing you said you already tried.” Good night.
Everybody collects _something_.
Clout is one hell of a thing
It seems silly, but there's probably a term for this because these little labels can easily influence our behavior. For me, it's the completion percentage in Lego games. The only Lego game I've ever played that I haven't 100%'d is Pirates of the Caribbean, and that's just because the game was so crash-happy that I literally could not complete story mode no matter what settings I tried or what steps I took in-game to try and avoid whatever I suspected might be causing the crashes. I even toiled through Skywalker Saga, despite what an absolute drag that game was, just for that 100%.
Gamification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
There was a strong trend by businesses to take this approach with pretty much anything users facing, from quite a few years ago (prob 14+).
Seems to have become the accepted norm since then.
In this regard, LLMs tend to be more useful in my experience (and I suspect this is playing a part in Apple's discontinuation of the forum, though the article is cut off by a paywall so I don't know if it mentions this). They have the same pitfalls of happy paths (and hallucinations, of course), but they are quite good about digging up some random tangent from a GitHub discussion for a completely unrelated product five years ago that ends up being exactly what you need with some extra prompting.
I had the exact same thought when I saw the headline. For their purported use, both forums have bafflingly low signal-to-noise.
Frankly, StackOverflow has generally been more useful, but I know that LLMs frequently mine the Apple Support Forums for their answers.
The infamous 'Run sfc /scannow' answer comes to mind. It never fixed the issue asked
For as broken as nostr is, there is so much more comfort in being able to have a local copy of your notes and being able to rebroadcast them should the need arise, and knowing it will work as if nothing happened.
In a way, a freeloader in nostr is more “protected” than a person running their own mastodon instance, because the domain you lease is not yours, and your handle is tied to that.
Also tangentially related: flatpak closed their discourse forum and redirected users into Matrix. Maybe nobody takes knowledge preservation seriously anymore.
Why? When they wrote those answers they (presumably) helped the people who asked questions at the time.
The fact that what they wrote won't (necessarily) continue indefinitely into the future doesn't diminish the value they provided in the past.
When I answer questions in a public forum, helping the person who asked the question is only about half of the value I expect to get from my contribution.
Granted, in the domain of tech support, the usefulness of answers is not as evergreen. But it's more about the curt, impersonal way they're cutting off a group of people who contributed a lot of value. Just abruptly muting everyone and then saying "this is all going away in a few days, kthxbye."
https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift/blob/master/d...
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
"You can just do things."
It'd be like if Wikipedia suddenly closed down tomorrow -- prolific editors would take cold comfort from being told their contributions are still available to anybody who downloads an obscure multi-gigabyte archive file.
If someone wants to build a spiritual successor, build it on AT Proto to prevent potential loss due to corporate actions in the future. A PDS for storage, a post per topic/thread, etc. Due to the inherent open nature of the social rails AT Proto offers, this enables robust, open consumption of the data by future prospective consumers, humans and agents alike. I’ll cover reasonable infrastructure costs. It’ll all be ingested by the Internet Archive for preservation.
Bradley speaking, intentional effort must go into cultivating and curating systems in this regard. The platform must be open and sustainably operated, and contributors and curators must be valued for their thankless, tireless, unpaid work. Like Wikipedia.
Multiply this by thousands of contributors.
Oh, your iPhone is malfunctioning in X way? Well you're probably doing something wrong you should go to the Apple Store.
I usually end up there when I stumble on a frustrating bug or persistent issue in iOS/macOS and there is always a thread with other similar complaints, and they are always unresolved.
There's usually a "power user" chiming in with "I've never heard of this so it must not exist" (these people cross-post on HN too).
My personal favorite Apple Support Community copypasta EVER is the guy who tells people dealing with obvious malware infections and/or security software of any kind that it is all worthless and really their own fault and responsibility if they are infected.
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.
Still need a way to accept user reports and feedback (imho) that are not necessarily bug reports, otherwise they're going to have an observability blind spot that the community forum was providing via user participation.
According to my own browser history last time I landed on this forum was to figure out why the Apple Maps app was taking so much storage despite being a rarely used app. The post https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256084682?sortBy=rank, which was the first thing from a search engine query, completely solved the mystery. It was the stupid significant locations feature that I don’t need.
Then the second item in my browser history was https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253015477?sortBy=rank which explains how to change the location where screenshots are stored. Isn’t it a superbly intuitive UX design that locations of screenshots produced by Command-Shift-4 should be changed by pressing Command-Shift-5?
The old `defaults` CLI command means almost no user would change the location of their screenshots so it would be consistent and predictable even when users switch between machines. Now a user has to use Command-Shift-5 first to configure the location before using Command-Shift-4.
I’ve also heard that the forum went downhill after a major redesign in 2011.
If there was going to be "something more modern and useful", Apple would have posted that.
It appears that Apple is simply killing the community with no replacement.
That compounded with how solutions become obsolete as Apple changes things for the sake of it makes me understand a little why Apple would want to sunset them.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/79235 (comments at the time: "macOS High Sierra: Anyone can login as “root” with empty password" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676)
(although this one was the developer forum, which seems separate?)
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.
Yea, those are annoying. "Turning on and off 50 computers is obviously not the solution".
With that said, individual computer problems can be very hard to solve. There are just so many different possible things going wrong. Now, if you get lots of people reporting it, and the reports point to a common cause then it's something that should be investigated.
I mostly agree, but my tiny amount of interaction with the Apple forum, on rather technical matters, highlighted another factor: The specific macOS error messages I was researching were beyond useless and seemed to have thousands of unrelated possible causes and solutions. So I found thread after thread, some with many pages of posts, offering many different solutions that worked for some people and not for others.
I edited my post. Thank you for catching this for me.
That echos exactly my experience there. That or one post with a question, one reply asking for more information, and then nothing.
Edit: Admittedly, I have a poor mental model of what is even happening in these cases. Are these "aliases" or something else? Unfortunately, Apple doesn't help elucidate the problems/mechanisms here. The only insights I have into what's happening is from mysterious errors and failure to deliver messages.
Now that I am using iMessage, I can't view past media or use the search functionality (for either messages or contacts). I actually thought this was by design until someone told me otherwise.
The very worst thing was that I have two people in my life who harass me. Blocking them would mean I can't keep a copy of threats I receive, so I kept them unblocked with read receipts disabled. With the iOS 26 update, despite having read receipts disabled (for these chats and in the global setting), they apparently received read receipts from me.
This should never happen. It gives the impression that something is thoroughly dysfunctional within Apple.
There's not much other reason to completely take it offline.
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!
But I think this is indicative of Apple, and other large companies: they don't really want to deal with the customer. I do give Apple credit that their phone support is pretty good, but most companies would rather you give up then actually speak to someone and get help.
So doesn’t affect me after they shut this down.
You rarely get good advice in these kinds of forums.
My most annoying long-term peeve with macOS is how long it takes to switch spaces with the touchpad gesture. It takes like 1.5 seconds from the gesture starts until a window on the target space gains focus. It was bad on 60Hz laptops but it's much worse on their ProMotion laptops.
There are lots and lots of support forum threads about this issue. Almost all of them have at least one person saying it can be fixed by turning on Reduce Motion in settings. It can't. Reduce Motion turns it from a 1.5 second slide animation to a 1.5 second cross-fade animation. I don't think the people suggesting fixes there even make an attempt at understanding the issue or trying out their proposed fix.
I won't miss it.
> 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.
Are they going to replace it with anything? Where will people discuss their Apple support issues?
just kidding, the Genius Bar is still open
EDIT: Seems like there is Microsoft Q&A now but it's a ghost town
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.
These forums were never helpful for me, random blogs, Reddit, and other forums (lol) have always been helpful.
Now that I type all that out, I hope it's not completely deleted. Leave it to science.
Shouldn't the vendor support community forums be the right place to get help for problems with a product?
I agree that they don't seem very effective. But where are they supposed to go?
Asking frontier LLMs to troubleshoot weird user-facing issues in anything (Apple, Microsoft, Linux) is basically the same exercise in frustration that wading through search results and forums used to be. They all give confidently wrong answers and ignore critical context forcing pointless iterations and clarifications. Often there is no solution provided other than “reinstall” or similar.
For companies where you have almost no hope of getting a human on the line? Sure.
I have to suspect that the developer forums are next.
If it could, it would probably shut down Reddit and a few other sites. /s
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
And yeah I know just ask AI9000 but guess where it gets the answers from...