by Jason Snell

Ding dong, the Apple Support Community is dead

In a long-overdue move, Apple has brought down the hammer on its “Apple Support Community” forum. As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors reports:

Apple’s full notice added to the site: “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. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.”

It is the end of an era. Apple offered an online discussion forum for user-to-user technical support since 1998, when it launched the Apple Tech Exchange. The forums were renamed to Apple Discussions in 2000, and then to the Apple Support Communities in 2011, before taking on their current Apple Support Community name in 2022.

Apple informed MacRumors that it decided to sunset the Apple Support Community after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.

These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. 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. I can’t tell you how many times I visited these forums while trying to track down the answer to a peculiar quirk or bug, only to find the (legitimate!) question being shut down by an officious high-ranking know-it-all who didn’t actually understand what was being asked and couldn’t provide a useful answer.

Good riddance.