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?
It’s bad UX because Command-Shift-5 brings up a UI that looks transient, and a user wouldn’t expect it to affect future invocations of Command-Shift-3 or 4. I’ve known multiple users who used Command-Shift-5 to take a single screenshot to their clipboard, and then lost all their subsequent Command-Shift-4 screenshots because they expect the screenshots to be saved to the filesystem not the clipboard.
The old `defaults` CLI command means almost no user would change the location of their screenshots so it would be consistent and predictable even when users switch between machines. Now a user has to use Command-Shift-5 first to configure the location before using Command-Shift-4.
Engineers from Apple would and do respond to some of the more technical questions here and there. Lots of great knowledge buried in their haystack. However, I generally agree that this used to be a more trustworthy resource back when forums were the Internet
I'm not even sure it was useful back then. So many answers to threads were just non-answers like "you can't do that" or "there is no fix."
It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeless.
In some ways, community forums for such a highly obfuscated operating system are somewhat useless, because the answer is always "hopefully Apple notices this and fixes it."
The times I've searched there and came up with lazy answers that farm the forums by copy-pasting the happy path in official documentation... If you're going there, you're looking for cases when "just works" "just doesn't", and the fix isn't covered in the official use cases.
That compounded with how solutions become obsolete as Apple changes things for the sake of it makes me understand a little why Apple would want to sunset them.
But if a canonical good source of info is to exist, where should it be so that AI doesn't devolve? Is it simply upvoting answers AI gives us, but again where should that info go? Maybe this repo of info was bad, but it feels like there needs to be some repo.
Well, there was the infamous "double press enter on a blank password gives you root" thing, that started out on the apple forums, and _was_ a solution :-)
Developer forums are indeed entirely separate, and historically quite useful. I haven't participated in years but it used to be easy enough to get eyeballs from relevant Apple engineers there.
Apple's view is if it is not intuitively obvious to you based on the User Interface you are doing it wrong, what you want to do is wrong, or you are stupid and should go to a genius bar for help.
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.
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.
Small correction: proportional, not inversely proportional.
I mostly agree, but my tiny amount of interaction with the Apple forum, on rather technical matters, highlighted another factor: The specific macOS error messages I was researching were beyond useless and seemed to have thousands of unrelated possible causes and solutions. So I found thread after thread, some with many pages of posts, offering many different solutions that worked for some people and not for others.
>strange phenomenon of the community members who want to be very helpful
Yea, those are annoying. "Turning on and off 50 computers is obviously not the solution".
With that said, individual computer problems can be very hard to solve. There are just so many different possible things going wrong. Now, if you get lots of people reporting it, and the reports point to a common cause then it's something that should be investigated.
> 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.
Hi Charles. I'm Greg, 10 years awarded Windows MVP, specializing in Installation, Performance, Troubleshooting and Activation, here to help you.
makes my blood boil. I'll take claudisms instead any day
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.
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 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.
If there's one website I won't waste a teardrop over, it's that Apple communities website. Good lord, that entire place is textbook example of technically-polite toxicity and gaslighting, inflicted by tactics not limited to non-answers. But then almost all the Apple related online communities are just that.
I'm glad someone is calling it like it is. That place is full of wankers with 400,000 karma points copypasting condescending drivel that helped no one.
Oh, your iPhone is malfunctioning in X way? Well you're probably doing something wrong you should go to the Apple Store.
I usually end up there when I stumble on a frustrating bug or persistent issue in iOS/macOS and there is always a thread with other similar complaints, and they are always unresolved.
There's usually a "power user" chiming in with "I've never heard of this so it must not exist" (these people cross-post on HN too).
My personal favorite Apple Support Community copypasta EVER is the guy who tells people dealing with obvious malware infections and/or security software of any kind that it is all worthless and really their own fault and responsibility if they are infected.
Obviously Apple Support Community precedes these advancements in decentralized web (and you could argue they benefit from centralization) but still, I don’t see a reason not to copy the nostr model of signed notes for public forums.
For as broken as nostr is, there is so much more comfort in being able to have a local copy of your notes and being able to rebroadcast them should the need arise, and knowing it will work as if nothing happened.
In a way, a freeloader in nostr is more “protected” than a person running their own mastodon instance, because the domain you lease is not yours, and your handle is tied to that.
Also tangentially related: flatpak closed their discourse forum and redirected users into Matrix. Maybe nobody takes knowledge preservation seriously anymore.
Also a good reminder to stop giving trillion dollar corporations free labor. Apple has absolutely pathetic documentation across everything they provide, them relying on free labor of their paid users is absolutely pathetic behavior and should be called out as such.
Older than the internet. On the crumbling ruin covered in goat shit reads "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Those profiles represent thousands of hours of invested time. Having them deleted from the internet means they've lost all of that accumulated work.
When I answer questions in a public forum, helping the person who asked the question is only about half of the value I expect to get from my contribution.
Pepperidge Farm and the web archive remember. Most unfortunately, it has also remembered my most egregious mistakes. I am happy and embarrassed at the same time.
Granted, in the domain of tech support, the usefulness of answers is not as evergreen. But it's more about the curt, impersonal way they're cutting off a group of people who contributed a lot of value. Just abruptly muting everyone and then saying "this is all going away in a few days, kthxbye."
I wasn't a regular there beyond from occasional search hits. But presumably heavy users would want their contributions preserved in a way that's still useful for the type of people they wrote them for in the first place. An archive.org or torrent copy means they still technically exist, but not in a way that's helpful in a practical way.
It'd be like if Wikipedia suddenly closed down tomorrow -- prolific editors would take cold comfort from being told their contributions are still available to anybody who downloads an obscure multi-gigabyte archive file.
We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. Apple’s hosting of it has come to an end, but there are trivial ways to continue to preserve and serve the information. It is what it is. I prefer defaulting to action instead of helplessness, other opinions will differ.
If someone wants to build a spiritual successor, build it on AT Proto to prevent potential loss due to corporate actions in the future. A PDS for storage, a post per topic/thread, etc. Due to the inherent open nature of the social rails AT Proto offers, this enables robust, open consumption of the data by future prospective consumers, humans and agents alike. I’ll cover reasonable infrastructure costs. It’ll all be ingested by the Internet Archive for preservation.
Broadly speaking, intentional effort must go into cultivating and curating systems in this regard. The platform must be open and sustainably operated, and contributors and curators must be valued for their thankless, tireless, unpaid work. Like Wikipedia.
It's ok, everything was ingested into model training. The ai companies save everything and give it back to us in the most accessible way possible, natural language.
I used to spend a significant amount of time on some forums that shut down many years ago. While some of it was technical help, there was also a social aspect to the forum I was on and I spoke with many of those people daily through the forum for over a decade. When it shut down, it left a hole that I've struggled to fill.
Losing a hobby isn't easy. If it was also their way to have a kind of pseudo-social connection, that also isn't easy to lose.
I've written support software for my company (not really in my job description). If somebody makes the decision to throw it all away suddenly, that would be a slap in the face.
That's indeed why it's taken down. Even recently I had an issue related to an external device that I thought was caused by the device. Turned out it was a Mac problem with a category of devices which didn't show this issue on any random Windows or even Linux box. I would never have known otherwise. It's clearly not in Apple's benefit for me to know this as it has lowered my opinion of their products.
There's not much other reason to completely take it offline.
When I had it disabled, iMessage would turn on with every major update. This prevented me from receiving SMS from iMessage users when I would turn it back off.
Now that I am using iMessage, I can't view past media or use the search functionality (for either messages or contacts). I actually thought this was by design until someone told me otherwise.
The very worst thing was that I have two people in my life who harass me. Blocking them would mean I can't keep a copy of threats I receive, so I kept them unblocked with read receipts disabled. With the iOS 26 update, despite having read receipts disabled (for these chats and in the global setting), they apparently received read receipts from me.
This should never happen. It gives the impression that something is thoroughly dysfunctional within Apple.
Not sure what parent was referring to, but for me iMessage frequently gets confused when dealing with devices that don't have a phone number or when moving SIMs between phones. Sometimes messages silently get routed to other devices or seem to disappear into the void in these cases which can be extremely frustrating. Since it's Apple, there's no way to tell when this is happening and try to correct it either. In theory iMessages tells me I'm sending a message to John Smith, but am I sending it to [email protected] or 555-122-4455 or some other alias associated with that Apple user? No way to tell until you get some error in iMessage that the message could not be delivered and no way to explicitly select which alias is going to receive it as far as I can tell.
Edit: Admittedly, I have a poor mental model of what is even happening in these cases. Are these "aliases" or something else? Unfortunately, Apple doesn't help elucidate the problems/mechanisms here. The only insights I have into what's happening is from mysterious errors and failure to deliver messages.
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.
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.
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.
It was a community support forum, designed for members of the community to help each other out. It was never a portal to technical help by Apple Engineers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I don't want to switch spaces using my keyboard, I like the touchpad gesture. Since I need a workflow where I can't use my preferred gesture anyway I just don't use spaces and have learned to live with cmd+tab and cmd+`.
I understand. I too am annoyed by that lag, but could not live w/o Spaces. Which is a shame because in addition to being annoying, they are buggy as hell…
Honestly I feel Apple should throw away their whole window manager and restart from scratch. It’s getting worse after each major release version since ~ at least 7 years ago!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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? 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.
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.
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.
No it’s not any better in my experience… the LLMs were trained on these forums. Are you suggesting that ChatGPT is trained on some internal Apple support knowledge base?
Asking frontier LLMs to troubleshoot weird user-facing issues in anything (Apple, Microsoft, Linux) is basically the same exercise in frustration that wading through search results and forums used to be. They all give confidently wrong answers and ignore critical context forcing pointless iterations and clarifications. Often there is no solution provided other than “reinstall” or similar.
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 have no idea why someone would downvote this comment. But I agree. After the Apple Seed discussion forums just disappeared, and now this one being shutdown, I’m sure the developer forums will be next to be limited and then shutdown. Seems like Apple doesn’t want anyone talking about issues on any of its websites.
If it could, it would probably shut down Reddit and a few other sites. /s
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
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.
They killed off their FTP site out of the blue some years ago, thankfully people had mirrored it. Apple has a history of just dropping stuff. Not as bad as Google but close.
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.
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?
The old `defaults` CLI command means almost no user would change the location of their screenshots so it would be consistent and predictable even when users switch between machines. Now a user has to use Command-Shift-5 first to configure the location before using Command-Shift-4.
It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeless.
In some ways, community forums for such a highly obfuscated operating system are somewhat useless, because the answer is always "hopefully Apple notices this and fixes it."
“why would you want to do that?”
That compounded with how solutions become obsolete as Apple changes things for the sake of it makes me understand a little why Apple would want to sunset them.
I’ve also heard that the forum went downhill after a major redesign in 2011.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/79235 (comments at the time: "macOS High Sierra: Anyone can login as “root” with empty password" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676)
(although this one was the developer forum, which seems separate?)
or should i say...
[i have this problem too]
If there was going to be "something more modern and useful", Apple would have posted that.
It appears that Apple is simply killing the community with no replacement.
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.
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.
That echos exactly my experience there. That or one post with a question, one reply asking for more information, and then nothing.
I mostly agree, but my tiny amount of interaction with the Apple forum, on rather technical matters, highlighted another factor: The specific macOS error messages I was researching were beyond useless and seemed to have thousands of unrelated possible causes and solutions. So I found thread after thread, some with many pages of posts, offering many different solutions that worked for some people and not for others.
I edited my post. Thank you for catching this for me.
Yea, those are annoying. "Turning on and off 50 computers is obviously not the solution".
With that said, individual computer problems can be very hard to solve. There are just so many different possible things going wrong. Now, if you get lots of people reporting it, and the reports point to a common cause then it's something that should be investigated.
Hi Charles. I'm Greg, 10 years awarded Windows MVP, specializing in Installation, Performance, Troubleshooting and Activation, here to help you.
makes my blood boil. I'll take claudisms instead any day
Hope somebody clones the site but I see it's protected by anti-crawler software now, thanks scrapers.
Obviously there never way to fix it in Apple walled garden, but at least you knew if others have same issues,
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.
we pay more, get less.
Oh, your iPhone is malfunctioning in X way? Well you're probably doing something wrong you should go to the Apple Store.
I usually end up there when I stumble on a frustrating bug or persistent issue in iOS/macOS and there is always a thread with other similar complaints, and they are always unresolved.
There's usually a "power user" chiming in with "I've never heard of this so it must not exist" (these people cross-post on HN too).
My personal favorite Apple Support Community copypasta EVER is the guy who tells people dealing with obvious malware infections and/or security software of any kind that it is all worthless and really their own fault and responsibility if they are infected.
For as broken as nostr is, there is so much more comfort in being able to have a local copy of your notes and being able to rebroadcast them should the need arise, and knowing it will work as if nothing happened.
In a way, a freeloader in nostr is more “protected” than a person running their own mastodon instance, because the domain you lease is not yours, and your handle is tied to that.
Also tangentially related: flatpak closed their discourse forum and redirected users into Matrix. Maybe nobody takes knowledge preservation seriously anymore.
Why? When they wrote those answers they (presumably) helped the people who asked questions at the time.
The fact that what they wrote won't (necessarily) continue indefinitely into the future doesn't diminish the value they provided in the past.
When I answer questions in a public forum, helping the person who asked the question is only about half of the value I expect to get from my contribution.
Granted, in the domain of tech support, the usefulness of answers is not as evergreen. But it's more about the curt, impersonal way they're cutting off a group of people who contributed a lot of value. Just abruptly muting everyone and then saying "this is all going away in a few days, kthxbye."
https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift/blob/master/d...
https://academictorrents.com/
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
"You can just do things."
It'd be like if Wikipedia suddenly closed down tomorrow -- prolific editors would take cold comfort from being told their contributions are still available to anybody who downloads an obscure multi-gigabyte archive file.
If someone wants to build a spiritual successor, build it on AT Proto to prevent potential loss due to corporate actions in the future. A PDS for storage, a post per topic/thread, etc. Due to the inherent open nature of the social rails AT Proto offers, this enables robust, open consumption of the data by future prospective consumers, humans and agents alike. I’ll cover reasonable infrastructure costs. It’ll all be ingested by the Internet Archive for preservation.
Broadly speaking, intentional effort must go into cultivating and curating systems in this regard. The platform must be open and sustainably operated, and contributors and curators must be valued for their thankless, tireless, unpaid work. Like Wikipedia.
Losing a hobby isn't easy. If it was also their way to have a kind of pseudo-social connection, that also isn't easy to lose.
Multiply this by thousands of contributors.
There's not much other reason to completely take it offline.
Now that I am using iMessage, I can't view past media or use the search functionality (for either messages or contacts). I actually thought this was by design until someone told me otherwise.
The very worst thing was that I have two people in my life who harass me. Blocking them would mean I can't keep a copy of threats I receive, so I kept them unblocked with read receipts disabled. With the iOS 26 update, despite having read receipts disabled (for these chats and in the global setting), they apparently received read receipts from me.
This should never happen. It gives the impression that something is thoroughly dysfunctional within Apple.
Edit: Admittedly, I have a poor mental model of what is even happening in these cases. Are these "aliases" or something else? Unfortunately, Apple doesn't help elucidate the problems/mechanisms here. The only insights I have into what's happening is from mysterious errors and failure to deliver messages.
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.
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
So doesn’t affect me after they shut this down.
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.
Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
- Claude Code fixed a broken Xcode installation that caused strange linker errors
- Claude (demonstratably) removed spyware from and declutterd my grandmas’s computer
You rarely get good advice in these kinds of forums.
Bad look for Apple. No public forums -> no public complaints.
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!
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.
Honestly I feel Apple should throw away their whole window manager and restart from scratch. It’s getting worse after each major release version since ~ at least 7 years ago!
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Apple_Discussions
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I won't miss it.
Are they going to replace it with anything? Where will people discuss their Apple support issues?
just kidding, the Genius Bar is still open
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.
EDIT: Seems like there is Microsoft Q&A now but it's a ghost town
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.
Now that I type all that out, I hope it's not completely deleted. Leave it to science.
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 companies where you have almost no hope of getting a human on the line? Sure.
Asking frontier LLMs to troubleshoot weird user-facing issues in anything (Apple, Microsoft, Linux) is basically the same exercise in frustration that wading through search results and forums used to be. They all give confidently wrong answers and ignore critical context forcing pointless iterations and clarifications. Often there is no solution provided other than “reinstall” or similar.
These forums were never helpful for me, random blogs, Reddit, and other forums (lol) have always been helpful.
I have to suspect that the developer forums are next.
If it could, it would probably shut down Reddit and a few other sites. /s
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.
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).
I had the exact same thought when I saw the headline. For their purported use, both forums have bafflingly low signal-to-noise.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
Everybody collects _something_.
Clout is one hell of a thing
The infamous 'Run sfc /scannow' answer comes to mind. It never fixed the issue asked
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.
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.
"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. "
Frankly, StackOverflow has generally been more useful, but I know that LLMs frequently mine the Apple Support Forums for their answers.
Good riddance.
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.
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.
Is this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?
- 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.
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.
And yeah I know just ask AI9000 but guess where it gets the answers from...