When people tried visiting the Apple Support Community site on Tuesday, they found not only that new posts were blocked, but that Apple is planning to shut down the forums permanently on Nov. 20. If you want to look up a specific Apple troubleshooting topic on iPhones or HomePods, now’s the time to do it. Soon, the entire peer advice and support site, which has been operating for nearly three decades, will be gone.
Apple was a pioneer in community support forums before the aughts, letting people discuss their Mac issues as early as 1998. For those of you who might remember, that’s the year Apple debuted its iMac G3, the desktop with a translucent blue teardrop-shaped case. The iMac G3 abandoned legacy ports and the floppy disk drive in favor of CD-ROM and USB.
Back then, the site was called Apple Tech Exchange, later renamed Apple Discussions until it eventually became the Apple Support Community in 2011. Many still turned to forums for DIY solutions, using it to get advice from other tinkerers interested in figuring out how to fix things on their own.
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An Apple spokesperson told CNET the decision was made “after careful evaluation of our strategy and our customers’ needs.” Apple’s site notification directs people to visit the official Apple Support site. You’ll also be able to use Apple’s online chat, support phone numbers and in-store support, the same way they worked in the past.
Apple is one of the first American tech companies to give up its community discussion site — Google still has Google Communities Help, and Amazon manages its own forum domain with discussions from both staff and users. But Apple’s sudden closure could indicate a major shift, with others eventually following suit. It has highlighted an ongoing discussion about the role of peer support in tech, how AI has changed our online conversations and more.
Apple nostalgia
When news of the shutdown spread, Apple users flocked to the internet to express everything from dismay to vindication.
For many, the Apple Support Community forums were controversial, not least because it wasn’t always clear how they worked. The site contained “user-submitted content, comments and opinions” and was “for informational purposes only,” yet many would mistake it for official Apple Support from staff.
In discussions on Reddit about the closure, many bemoaned the absence of real Apple employees from the site’s forums and found the advice from other Support Community users to often be frustrating and not worth the effort. On the unofficial Apple subreddit, many mourned the loss of community while also noting that answers on the forum were often much harder to come by. Others said the site grew less helpful over the years.
CNET phone reviewer and senior editor Mike Sorrentino told me that the forum shutdown “will likely drive customers looking for help with basic questions to Apple’s official support articles rather than user-created threads.” But Sorrentino also acknowledged that the move reflects a general trend away from the site, with more people getting answers from sites like Reddit. “Apple’s always been big on controlling what information is shown on its website, and in that view, moving away from user discussion makes sense,” he said.
Just this week, I used the Apple Support Community site when looking for an answer to a problem implementing Apple Intelligence on my home security cameras, which required jumping through multiple hoops. Perhaps tellingly, I ended up finding the correct answer on Reddit myself. But that could become harder to do in the near future.
In search of support
The shutdown of Apple’s peer support forums is definitely a sign of the times, especially as tech companies push users away from repairing their own devices and toward replacing them outright — or at least encourage device owners to pay for official support services. It’s also a sign of the growing role of artificial intelligence, which is capitalizing on user-created content to provide summaries, moving people away from organic discussion and exchange on sites like these.
Reddit has lucrative data-licensing contracts with Google and OpenAI, allowing the companies to train their AI models on Reddit’s massive archive of human discussions, as well as surface Reddit content in tools like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Reddit is also moving to a login-only viewing mode, making it significantly harder for casual users to find answers unless they trust AI summaries.
Apple may be leery of keeping so much user knowledge online for AI models to scrape for their own answers. The company may also want to prevent AI summaries from providing information from past forum users on how to jailbreak Apple devices or DIY fixes, even as the EU has mandated that Apple start building replaceable batteries by next year. And it wouldn’t be a good look if Siri AI started regurgitating incorrect or outdated info it had picked up from Apple’s own sites.
Whatever the reason, the circle of Apple users helping users has grown smaller, and that doesn’t bode well for support forums as a whole. It may be time to start archiving those years of data before other tech companies implement similar plans.
With degrees in business management, literature and technical writing, Tyler takes every opportunity to play with the latest AI technology, push smart devices to their limits and occasionally throw cameras off his roof, all to find the best devices to trust in your life. He always checks with the renters (and pets) in his life to see what smart products can work for everyone, in every living situation.
Living in beautiful Bend, Oregon, gives Tyler plenty of opportunities to test the latest tech in every kind of weather and temperature. But when not at work, he can be found hiking the trails, trying out a new food recipe for his loved ones, keeping up on his favorite reading or gaming with good friends.
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