Apple is pulling the plug on one of the internet’s most storied troubleshooting sites, the Apple Support Community. In a notice apparently posted Tuesday on the longstanding Apple user forum, the company said the site will shut down later this month.
“The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026,” the notice says. “Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.”
Reactions to the abrupt closure ranged from nostalgic reminiscences about useful information found on the forums to “good riddance” to something that outlived its usefulness.
Apple Support Community shutting down
For nearly three decades, Apple’s support forums — in one form or another — offered something even the world’s most valuable tech company couldn’t manufacture: a community of passionate users willing to help each other.
Users could find obscure fixes to niche problems, discover workarounds that Apple itself never documented, and get answers from people who knew their Macs and iPhones inside out. And they often complained about Apple’s lack of responsiveness to ongoing bugs.
The forums, which launched as Apple Tech Exchange in 1998, morphed into Apple Discussions in 2000 and became the Apple Support Community in 2011.
Now Apple is pulling the plug, ending a remarkable chapter in the company’s history.
Users react to the forums’ closure
Some Apple fans responded online with a mix of nostalgia and concern.
“Sad to see that Apple is shutting down their own Support Community,” Mr. Macintosh wrote Tuesday on X. “Over the past 17 years, I’ve made more than 632 replies on the site, mostly in the Enterprise, Xserve, and OS X Server areas. I hope Apple recognizes the historical value of these discussions and preserves them.”
Others were not so kind.
“These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple,” Jason Snell wrote Wednesday on Six Colors. “Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way. But they weren’t, nor were they helpful. They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help.”
Personally, I’ve spent many harried afternoons searching the Apple Support Community forums trying to troubleshoot a HomePod mini “ghost touch” problem or fix a weird iPhone glitch. Sometimes I found exactly the advice I needed. Other times I wasted what seemed like hours going down one rabbit hole or another.
Such is the nature of online forums. AI tools like ChatGPT — which draw from sources like the Apple Support Community — can help frustrated users cut to the chase. However, if all the user forums go away, where will the next round of niche fixes come from? Apple fans will likely just move to other forums like Reddit.
Where to find answers after Apple Support Community shuts down
Apple told MacRumors reporter Joe Rossignol that users can “expect the [Apple Support Community] forums to be entirely removed after November 20,” he wrote on X. “Not even read-only. Gone.” The company said it “made this decision after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs,” according to Rossignol.
So, what does Apple recommend going forward for people searching for answers to tough problems with Macs, iPhones and other Apple hardware and software?
“You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site,” the shutdown notice says. “We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.”
The move comes shortly after new Apple CEO John Ternus took over on September 1. Ternus promised fiscal discipline before taking the reins of the world’s most valuable company. Recent reports indicate he’s cutting jobs to make Apple leaner and more agile, with the ultimate goal of launching more products, faster. Shutting down the Apple Support Community seems like just another component of his move to shake up the company.
Lewis Wallace is the managing editor of Cult of Mac and author of our weekly newsletter, The Weekender. He appears weekly on the Cult of Mac podcast. You can find him on X @lewiswallace.
