Tonight, however, users who tried to access the platform were greeted with the following message:
The AppleCare 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.
The sad part about this is the wealth of historical knowledge that will be lost by the forum going offline. Of course I’d guess Apple is doing this to stop a.i. scraping of this data to enrich other LLMs.
The company who strives to make any older version of hardware or software as unsupported as possible as soon as possible (unless of course it’s a fucking lightning cable that results in a profit for them and millions of pieces of e-waste as people kept buying them over the years) continued with their MO. Cannot say it is surprising.
Aren’t these the ones that sucked because old threads are read-only. The volume of times I’ve found a solution and gone to post it, but can’t, is ridiculous.
At least with stack overflow you could add new info to old issues.
It’s a profoundly stupid decision. Typical of Apple of the last ten or so years. The good days are far gone.
Uh-oh, sounds like support will be provided by a chatbot soon.
Guarantee the new guy is only concerned with “maximizing shareholder value,” which means Apple as we knew it is toast. They were already having difficulty innovating, soon they won’t even bother trying.
How much were these forums costing them? They don’t actually employ people to answer questions do they? I thought it was more of a prestige thing to be an expert that answers questions on there. Even so, it probably costs less to run than any of their other existing support channels.
I would think that the reason is probably more to do with the changed landscape of online forums, ie. moderation in the age of LLMs is just too difficult, on top of the regulatory environment that’s expecting age verification for anything with even a whiff of user interaction.
