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Comments (206)

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  garciasn
  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.
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  Aurornis
  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.
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  Jordan-117
  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.
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  wafflebot
  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.
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  drbscl
  A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved
• keane
  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.
• muizzyomide
  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.
• timothyduong
  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.
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  Zenul_Abidin
  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.
• gcanyon
  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.
• EmX_3000
  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.
• DevKoala
  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.
• AuthorizedCust
  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.
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  bradknowles
  Has anyone heard the real reason for this?Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
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  jr3592
  That forum was single handedly made relevant thanks to one person - Eskimo.
• xd1936
  We need to spin up ArchiveTeam Warrior ASAPhttps://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Apple_Discussions
• rolosa
  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.
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  rootsudo
  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.
• anon
  undefined
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  speedylight
  Relative to profits, this forum costs Apple pennies to run what the hell :(
• newscracker
  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!
• vr46
  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.
• herf
  It could be they ran Mythos on it, found a lot of bugs, and decided it wasn't worth patching.
• humblepie
  That's good. Right now that site is just polluting search results with useless info. It used to be helpful back pre-2010s.
• jp57
  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.
• agoodusername63
  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.
• mdotk
  It's always been completely useless anyway. Never, EVER, got an answer from it.
• Brosper
  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.
• throw0101c
  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.
• ThatSum
  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.
• throw0101c
  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.
• paulschreiber
  Good. That place was a cesspit of wrong answers.
• anticensor
  Hmm, could spark the contributions on Ask Different for a brief while.
• 1over137
  I miss Apple’s mailing lists. They were quite good back in the day.
• timcobb
  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?
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  waiwai933
  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)
• MiroslavPokorny
  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.
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  jordemort
  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
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  kjellsbells
  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
• asdff
  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.
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  sho
  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.
• rplnt
  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.
• mannyv
  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.
• jen729w
  Finally.
• NetOpWibby
  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.
• RockstarSprain
  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.
• spiderfarmer
  This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.
• twodave
  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”.
• nektro
  are they going to be offering a dump of the data?
• TheRealPomax
  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?
• willmadden
  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.
• jmull
  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.
• lapcat
  "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...
• halyconWays
  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?"
• moragabriele
  I always found very generic response in the Apple Support Community honestly
• xyst
  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).
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  sunaookami
  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.
• avazhi
  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.
• thraway3837
  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.
• iAMkenough
  > 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.
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  ulfw
  Link doesn't work, like everything AppleIs this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?
• thrill
  "...and nothing of value was lost"
• VCFundedGenYer
  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.
• pmkary
  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
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  mmooss
  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.
• krikrinitsyna
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• muoooooo
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• remusrm
  [dead]
• solyin
  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.
• schappim
  There are so many people who have their identities wrapped in that forum… just look at their post signature blocks.
• expedition32
  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...