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been put to sleep years ago, its only function is to clog up the internet with half-truths, unanswered problems, and outdated workarounds.
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.
They pretty religiously purged posts that were evidence of anything confirmed vulnerable, such as the many instances of malformed media files causing icloud and then the devices to do increasingly insecure things
> I don't remember the last time I found anything useful on there.
Ditto. I'm sure it was a valuable resource during the earlier years of Apple when they were a much smaller company with a much smaller community of users, but those days are long gone.
sounds like Apple is trying to get customers to perform their support duties. Same thing with Microsoft, Dell, Nvidia, etc. Saves them a ton of money not having to actually provide real support.
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.
LLMs. I’d be surprised if there’s a tech support problem they can’t solve. If so, it’s probably so interesting you can write a blog post about it and/or post it to HN.
I have yet to encounter the tech problem they can solve. LLMs really suck at troubleshooting, they love to go on esoteric tangents that are unlikely to succeed and then get hung up there.
People dont come to forums to praise how amazing Apple products are. They come to complain about issues and about "free trial" services being activated for them without their knowledge in Apple Stores.
Bad look for Apple. No public forums -> no public complaints.
> 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.
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.
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.
I have the same experience with such forums. Worse, they often clutter search results with their non-answers (yes, I know you can filter them with Kagi). These companies probably loved the idea of free labor, but 'community experts' usually don't have access to relevant internal information or developers to address many real problems.
Apple's forum (and many like it) has a little post count indicator. There's also a "level" beneath your name and, while I don't know how Apple's forum decides this (if it's purely based on post count, activity over time, how many people hit the "me too" button on your posts, or something else), those can be powerful incentives.
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%.
Sounds like Stack Overflow, replaced by AIs. That was discussed on HN recently.
Ubuntu forums are still somewhat useful. About half the answers are at the "turn it off and turn it on" again level, but sometimes someone with a clue answers.
The thing I liked about Stack Overflow is that non-answers would get downvoted, which never happens on these forums, and almost never happens on Reddit.
It actually fixed an issue for me one time! When I did tech support sometimes I would run sfc /scannow just to buy time while researching the actual issue and was genuinely surprised when it worked.
People need to read Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to understand how to design a forum encouraging good social interactions. For what it’s worth Stack Overflow had a significantly better signal-to-noise ratio than the Apple or MS forums.
(Disclaimer: I've been on SO since 2009 with almost 200k rep now)
Yes, SO has rightfully earned a reputation for being unfriendly (at best!) to software-dev neophytes; I don't want to handwave-away the problem, but I don't believe SO was intended as a good place for beginners, nor as a place tolerant of _forum faux-pas_[1]; SO was just intended as a better (and free) replacement for expertsexchange - and the disconnected, disparate collection of web-forums or Usenet groups that focused on a single language or platform.
So if I wrote the above post, I think I'd re-phrase it by saying SO was an example of "good _professional_ interaction": the site/format works great when everyone understands each other. SO would be even better if it could solve that problem, but to-date, no-one has figured-out a solution to that problem; whereas if we look at ChatGPT-as-a-replacement-for-SO, it hasn't solved the problem either, but avoids it, by not having people interact with other people anymore - this may or may not be a good thing in the long term.
----
[1] e.g. the cardinal sin of posting new threads without checking for existing threads first; putting "URGENT!" in the subject-line; posting with a sense of entitlement; etc.
Only for the most boilerplate issues I would find. Actual technical discussion best I've seen is github issues. Finally here are the users who know how to peak behind the curtain of the gui and we can go right to exchanging patched forks ahead of even the maintainer pushing a change.
I feel like community forums for big companies trend towards this steady state of mediocrity since the forums are usually treated as a dumping ground to try and offload support obligations, giving the appearance of caring without having to add anyone new to the payroll. The people who become absorbed in these forums are in what is effectively a parasocial relationship and are ill-equipped to answer the questions because their knowledge of the product rarely goes beyond surface level, so their answers tend to fall into the "happy path" category, the ones usually available in public documentation or with a basic knowledge of computers, like how bugs caused by configuration errors introduced in past software versions can frequently be fixed by reinstalling (newer versions of) the program or that restarting can fix random bugs that accumulate the longer the system is on.
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.
Agreed. 90% of it was the same copy and paste (run these eight reports, uninstall and reinstall your software, then come talk to us). Like, no, I just want to know whether anyone has found a solution this problem.
This is aggravating because some usb microphones have headphone jacks and do function as speakers. MacOS doesn’t know it’s microphone shaped and happily switches to it.
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.
> 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.
It’s the thing where you posted bugs, Apple ignored you, and you got hectored by 60 year old self-declared technical experts from the flyover who would ask you 30 questions before telling you you were holding it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
It was pretty useful to know when something got broken for more than just you. E.g like iPhone mirroring being absolutely unreliable.
Obviously there never way to fix it in Apple walled garden, but at least you knew if others have same issues,
They pretty religiously purged posts that were evidence of anything confirmed vulnerable, such as the many instances of malformed media files causing icloud and then the devices to do increasingly insecure things
> I don't remember the last time I found anything useful on there.
Ditto. I'm sure it was a valuable resource during the earlier years of Apple when they were a much smaller company with a much smaller community of users, but those days are long gone.
sounds like Apple is trying to get customers to perform their support duties. Same thing with Microsoft, Dell, Nvidia, etc. Saves them a ton of money not having to actually provide real support.
enshitiffication.
we pay more, get less.
Was it worse than Microsoft Answers?
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.
We need to spin up ArchiveTeam Warrior ASAP
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Apple_Discussions
Has anyone heard the real reason for this?
Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
Have worked with apple machines for over 20 years and have found little to no good information on this website. (Manage 1100 Apple devices)
Not sure if good, but https://talk.macpowerusers.com/
MacRumors has the most active forum I know of.
LLMs. I’d be surprised if there’s a tech support problem they can’t solve. If so, it’s probably so interesting you can write a blog post about it and/or post it to HN.
For questions about Apple products, I've often had multiple models answer by websearching discussions.apple.com.
But the solutions on the Apple Support Community are often inaccurate, and I've often seen models confidently parrot those inaccurate solutions.
Any examples of actual problems solved?
Anecdotally OTOH:
- Claude Code fixed a broken Xcode installation that caused strange linker errors
- Claude (demonstratably) removed spyware from and declutterd my grandmas’s computer
I have yet to encounter the tech problem they can solve. LLMs really suck at troubleshooting, they love to go on esoteric tangents that are unlikely to succeed and then get hung up there.
LLMs are great at hallucinating menu options that dont exist and entire features that dont exist just to get to the end. Have fun with that.
Have you used recent frontier models? They can troubleshoot and fix your machine themselves.
Siri
Relative to profits, this forum costs Apple pennies to run what the hell :(
People dont come to forums to praise how amazing Apple products are. They come to complain about issues and about "free trial" services being activated for them without their knowledge in Apple Stores.
Bad look for Apple. No public forums -> no public complaints.
It's always been completely useless anyway. Never, EVER, got an answer from it.
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.
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.
I always found very generic response in the Apple Support Community honestly
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.
I have the same experience with such forums. Worse, they often clutter search results with their non-answers (yes, I know you can filter them with Kagi). These companies probably loved the idea of free labor, but 'community experts' usually don't have access to relevant internal information or developers to address many real problems.
> It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.
I had the exact same thought when I saw the headline. For their purported use, both forums have bafflingly low signal-to-noise.
“trying to up their reply count” what’s the incentive for that?
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.
Apple's forum (and many like it) has a little post count indicator. There's also a "level" beneath your name and, while I don't know how Apple's forum decides this (if it's purely based on post count, activity over time, how many people hit the "me too" button on your posts, or something else), those can be powerful incentives.
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%.
> there's probably a term for this
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.
People care about karma on this site. What's the incentive for that?
> what’s the incentive for that?
Everybody collects _something_.
> what’s the incentive for that
Clout is one hell of a thing
Sounds like Stack Overflow, replaced by AIs. That was discussed on HN recently.
Ubuntu forums are still somewhat useful. About half the answers are at the "turn it off and turn it on" again level, but sometimes someone with a clue answers.
The thing I liked about Stack Overflow is that non-answers would get downvoted, which never happens on these forums, and almost never happens on Reddit.
>It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.
The infamous 'Run sfc /scannow' answer comes to mind. It never fixed the issue asked
Same deal with the “reset PRAM” on Macs suggested for all sorts of problems it has nothing to do with.
It actually fixed an issue for me one time! When I did tech support sometimes I would run sfc /scannow just to buy time while researching the actual issue and was genuinely surprised when it worked.
People need to read Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to understand how to design a forum encouraging good social interactions. For what it’s worth Stack Overflow had a significantly better signal-to-noise ratio than the Apple or MS forums.
Are you citing Stack Overflow as an example of good social interactions?
(Disclaimer: I've been on SO since 2009 with almost 200k rep now)
Yes, SO has rightfully earned a reputation for being unfriendly (at best!) to software-dev neophytes; I don't want to handwave-away the problem, but I don't believe SO was intended as a good place for beginners, nor as a place tolerant of _forum faux-pas_[1]; SO was just intended as a better (and free) replacement for expertsexchange - and the disconnected, disparate collection of web-forums or Usenet groups that focused on a single language or platform.
So if I wrote the above post, I think I'd re-phrase it by saying SO was an example of "good _professional_ interaction": the site/format works great when everyone understands each other. SO would be even better if it could solve that problem, but to-date, no-one has figured-out a solution to that problem; whereas if we look at ChatGPT-as-a-replacement-for-SO, it hasn't solved the problem either, but avoids it, by not having people interact with other people anymore - this may or may not be a good thing in the long term.
----
[1] e.g. the cardinal sin of posting new threads without checking for existing threads first; putting "URGENT!" in the subject-line; posting with a sense of entitlement; etc.
Not social, but technical. At some point in time, it really did have pretty good quality answers for my questions.
Only for the most boilerplate issues I would find. Actual technical discussion best I've seen is github issues. Finally here are the users who know how to peak behind the curtain of the gui and we can go right to exchanging patched forks ahead of even the maintainer pushing a change.
You and I have had markedly different experiences with StackOverflow. It was better than Apple community forums, but man am I glad it’s dead.
I feel like community forums for big companies trend towards this steady state of mediocrity since the forums are usually treated as a dumping ground to try and offload support obligations, giving the appearance of caring without having to add anyone new to the payroll. The people who become absorbed in these forums are in what is effectively a parasocial relationship and are ill-equipped to answer the questions because their knowledge of the product rarely goes beyond surface level, so their answers tend to fall into the "happy path" category, the ones usually available in public documentation or with a basic knowledge of computers, like how bugs caused by configuration errors introduced in past software versions can frequently be fixed by reinstalling (newer versions of) the program or that restarting can fix random bugs that accumulate the longer the system is on.
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.
But, 50,000 posts saying "Have you tried resetting the PRAM and resetting the SMC?" are going to be deleted from the internet!
Agreed. 90% of it was the same copy and paste (run these eight reports, uninstall and reinstall your software, then come talk to us). Like, no, I just want to know whether anyone has found a solution this problem.
Here's my summary of MS Answers.
"Don't worry I will help you OK? click click click right click open as Administrator. Now type
sfc /scannow
Please don't forget to mark the issue solved. "
My favorite: “that’s not possible by default in the ecosystem, at best you can install third party software that kinda works”
Trying to get Mac is too stop recognizing my USB microphone as a speaker was infuriating. Half of my zoom calls defaulters to the mic as output.
This is aggravating because some usb microphones have headphone jacks and do function as speakers. MacOS doesn’t know it’s microphone shaped and happily switches to it.
and associated subReddits.
I’ve had a lot of helpful stuff, but also, lots of useless and dated stuff.
Frankly, StackOverflow has generally been more useful, but I know that LLMs frequently mine the Apple Support Forums for their answers.
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.
> 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.
Link doesn't work, like everything Apple
Is this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?
It’s the thing where you posted bugs, Apple ignored you, and you got hectored by 60 year old self-declared technical experts from the flyover who would ask you 30 questions before telling you you were holding it wrong.
Or you got the Apple employee that got to have the E-slur as their username and email alias, apparently.
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.