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.
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.
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?
Probably cheaper to have any moderators they've had curate the forum instead work on the internal knowledge base an LLM front end is relying on for grounding and the rhlf loop. Think Wikipedia moderators tending to the corpus with a chatbot serving users (lots of load bearing and aspiration in this comment, I am aware).
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.
this is the exact same experience with the Microsoft "support forums"; I wonder if you see just as many posts from overseas social engineering scams asking for full details of everything as the first response to every single help request.
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.
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.
This. It was always some customer service person, and generally referenced other documents that were not helpful.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
Sounds like it was a failed service from the start and they've only just now realized it's still there, now polluting AI answers - not hallucinated after all, borne from the worthless apple support forum.
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.
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.
Disagree.
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?
Believe it or not, Command-Shift-5 is the better UX compared to before, which was a `defaults` CLI command.
Same. I've almost never found my question actually answered there.
Like an LLM!
Probably cheaper to have any moderators they've had curate the forum instead work on the internal knowledge base an LLM front end is relying on for grounding and the rhlf loop. Think Wikipedia moderators tending to the corpus with a chatbot serving users (lots of load bearing and aspiration in this comment, I am aware).
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.
A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved
Which reflects badly on Apple. Closing a forum with such embarrassing entries is cheaper than fixing anything. Apple has become a ludicrous shit show.
Say what you will about Jobs, but his ability to avoid enshitification was legendary.
They someone fix one thing and break another in Home every release. And iMessages.... what a piece of shit.
What’s wrong with iMessage?
this is the exact same experience with the Microsoft "support forums"; I wonder if you see just as many posts from overseas social engineering scams asking for full details of everything as the first response to every single help request.
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.
It could be they ran Mythos on it, found a lot of bugs, and decided it wasn't worth patching.
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.
This. It was always some customer service person, and generally referenced other documents that were not helpful.
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.
https://imgur.com/a/PhA5iT3
I could never get my issue resolved by an Apple Engineer via the support forums anyway.
So doesn’t affect me after they shut this down.
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".
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
isn't this pretty much every response from an LLM (probably trained on this shit)?
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)
I miss Apple’s mailing lists. They were quite good back in the day.
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.
There's also a ton of "fixes" which don't work.
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.
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
when they're not trying to do the support scam - inbound marketing style!
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.
> tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places,
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?
For Apple? Probably not, never had an issue getting tech support from a real person that speaks my language fluently.
For companies where you have almost no hope of getting a human on the line? Sure.
I imagine normal users are going to ChatGPT now - and that it's far, far better than anything they would ever find on apple.com
Sounds like it was a failed service from the start and they've only just now realized it's still there, now polluting AI answers - not hallucinated after all, borne from the worthless apple support forum.
This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.