alt Hacker NewsApple is killing its Support Community forum next week
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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.
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.
A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved
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.
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 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.
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!
It’s just like the Microsoft forums: it’s stacked with trolls providing useless answers just to jack up some kind of score.
You rarely get good advice in these kinds of forums.
That forum was single handedly made relevant thanks to one person - Eskimo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good. That place was a cesspit of wrong answers.
It could be they ran Mythos on it, found a lot of bugs, and decided it wasn't worth patching.
That's good. Right now that site is just polluting search results with useless info. It used to be helpful back pre-2010s.
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.
Older thread with less/no traction:
Have to be honest, not once have I ever found a solution to anything on that board. I generally consider it search engine junk when it comes up now.
I won't miss 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.
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.
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
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
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.
I'm surprised there's a severe lack of moral outrage here...huh.
These forums were never helpful for me, random blogs, Reddit, and other forums (lol) have always been helpful.
I miss Apple’s mailing lists. They were quite good back in the day.
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.
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)
This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.
Not surprising. Most of the information I’ve found on the forum is either obvious (to me), flat out wrong or else just a “yep we don’t support that”.
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).
"Apple has confirmed to us that not only are the forums getting shut down, they're being taken completely offline." https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/11/11/apple-support-com...
"...and nothing of value was lost"
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"
All of these issues likely came to a head.
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.
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The problem with forums is that 20 year olds don't have the patience to use them- and that is even assuming they can read.
And yeah I know just ask AI9000 but guess where it gets the answers from...
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.