Apple is shutting down its 28-year-old Support Community forum for good
Apple is killing its Support Community forum next week
The Apple Support Community, a user-to-user troubleshooting forum that dates back to 1998 as the Apple Tech Exchange, is now read-only and will close permanently on November 20th. Apple says it made the call after a careful review of strategy and customer needs, pointing users to its official support site. What happens to decades of archived posts is unclear, but they'll likely vanish with the platform.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- anticensor
Hmm, could spark the contributions on Ask Different for a brief while.