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."
> It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeles
That was true for me, back when my 14-month-old iMac (I was relying on to make music) developed color streaks on both sides of the display. The forum told me I was one of hundreds of victims ... before that topic was erased. A 'fix' took a couple of years to be offered.
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.
Exactly. I already know the happy path. Repeating it back to me is just wasting everybody's time.
This reminds me of the ubiquitous message that every customer service robot repeats when you call them on the phone: "Please go to our website for help. Otherwise you'll be waiting here another 15 minutes."
No, you jerks. Your website is throwing a Javascript error and it doesn't work. That's why I'm calling you. Do you honestly think I'd have used the telephone if your damn website worked?
I feel like "please try our website" was helpful advice fifteen or twenty years ago. Now the only reason I'm calling is because your website is broken and your AI agent is only capable of linking to help pages.
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.
While I agree with this, I'm also experiencing more bugs in Apple software than I ever have before, and it's really frustrating to see Apple shutting down the direct line of public feedback right in the middle of that.
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.
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.
It's slightly better than the Windows support forum only because it doesn't hijack your browser navigation, and because most answers don't start with "Hello $name, I am Doug America, a fellow user like yourself! I am happy to assist your question."
Actually it's also slightly improved from the earlier days, where nearly every thread was 1) works for me, it must be your fault, 2) why do you even want to do that? 3) that's not a bug, that's working as designed, 4) you think you know better than Apple how your computer should work? 5) oh, so you just hate Apple software? You're a Micro$oft fanboy? 6) you didn't even run EtreCheck, and you're asking why you keep getting Kernel panics? Why are you even posting here? Etc.
Now, occasionally, when it shows up in my search results, there are answers rather than just berating OP. (Kinda like StackOverflow, at some point they must have realized that you can't just cede control of your forum to the most pedantic users on there)
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.
Microsoft in particular has this tendency to hire random people who have no idea what the product is about and let them loose on the forums to “answer” questions. You end up with a lot of -msft aliases replying complete nonsense.
Like a post about how chrome on windows doesn’t work with a DNS error, and the -msft person reply was instructions to go to the control panel and open IE settings and clear the cache. Like wth? Then they wait for few days, maybe ask if that solves the problem to no reply, then accept their own answer as an answer to resolve the post.
> 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
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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 johnsmith@icloud.com 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.
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.
Apple has been speedrunning the "Corporate Soulless Behemoth" since about the time that SJ kicked the bucket. There's no community care to be found there for years, it's only a corporate thing doing crowd control at this point.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"It takes like 1.5 seconds from the gesture starts until a window on the target space gains focus."
It's even worse than that. If you don't lift your finger from the touchpad, the gesture never gets to the target space, no matter how long you wait. E.g. if you want to scroll something in the target space with the 2-finger scroll gesture, but your fingers touch down before the space-switching animation had fully finished, then the content in the target space won't receive the scroll gesture, no matter how long you wait. Your fingers must touch down after the - very gentle and slow - animation has fully played out.
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.
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.
You must be superhumanly bad at using this class of tool. They work pretty well for troubleshooting, and can be told to share their sources. This has allowed me to fix all sorts of issues I wouldn't have been able to without 50+ minutes of searching.
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.
Something like 20 years ago when I was living in NYC, I was invited to the Apple Store in Chelsea to take part in a panel about the forums with Apple staff. I hadn't used them in years, but I had a lot of posts with upvotes or whatever it was.
Anyway, I don't remember anything about the panel, but afterwards they took us to this swanky restaurant with a huge charcuterie spread and an open bar. I remember commenting to one of the other participants that the wine was like $20.00+ per glass, with a bit of a cringe. An Apple employee overheard me and was like "don't worry about it, this is all on Apple!"
Pretty sure I drank like $1000.00 worth of wine that night, and I remember ending up in a cab with some Apple staff members who were in town from California, but I'm not sure if we carried on after that.
If anyone from Apple is reading this, maybe we should all get together for a debriefing/lessons learned now that it's all shutting down?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Does anyone know if this includes the Apple Developer Forums or only the consumer community? The dev forums are one of the few places you sometimes get an answer from someone at Apple. Losing those would hurt a lot more than this.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes it’s better than the Apple forums. And if Apple put as much thought and care into their own forums, their forums could have been as good as Stack Overflow.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sad about this, so much knowledge is there and continues to be there. We can't rely on other 3rd party sites such as Reddit or Discord (even worse!) to store this data.
Shoutout to Quinn, who has made many incredibly helpful posts in these forums. Maybe some posts by others weren't as helpful, but Quinn's comments were great.
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. 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.
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.
> 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.
Man, that handful of blessed dudes who spent decent portions of their lives and mental capital trying to earn "good karma" and up-votes on their freely delivered help and fixes.
Back to their workbenches, soldering irons in hand. Mac OS X 10.0 framed launch poster on the wall...
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? 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.
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
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why in the age of more and more slop in software development do companies close more and more avenues for getting feedback that could counter that a bit?
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
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"
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.
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.
Disagree.
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?
Believe it or not, Command-Shift-5 is the better UX compared to before, which was a `defaults` CLI command.
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."
Even „there is no fix“ is a helpful answer because it means I can stop searching the apple forum and instead turn to figuring out another solution.
I never took that type of response at face value though. Even experts are often wrong.
Well, that was the other problem with Apple discussions, nobody there was an expert.
It isn't helpful unless coming from an authoritative source, which the forum is not
> It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeles
That was true for me, back when my 14-month-old iMac (I was relying on to make music) developed color streaks on both sides of the display. The forum told me I was one of hundreds of victims ... before that topic was erased. A 'fix' took a couple of years to be offered.
That's still useful.. 'No-one has managed to fix this' is good to know, even if it's not the answer one might want to find.
You’re forgetting the mid-2000s classic:
“why would you want to do that?”
Don't forget to reset the PRAM.
Omg you and your parent commenter are bringing back nightmares.
Reminds me of this classic: https://www.thermocow.com/articles/apple-fanboys-defend-the-...
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.
Exactly. I already know the happy path. Repeating it back to me is just wasting everybody's time.
This reminds me of the ubiquitous message that every customer service robot repeats when you call them on the phone: "Please go to our website for help. Otherwise you'll be waiting here another 15 minutes."
No, you jerks. Your website is throwing a Javascript error and it doesn't work. That's why I'm calling you. Do you honestly think I'd have used the telephone if your damn website worked?
I feel like "please try our website" was helpful advice fifteen or twenty years ago. Now the only reason I'm calling is because your website is broken and your AI agent is only capable of linking to help pages.
At least it let you know that the problem you’re trying to solve is real (and typically unfixable) and it isn’t just you.
I’ve also heard that the forum went downhill after a major redesign in 2011.
That it isn't just you holding it wrong can be oddly comforting.
> it's just time they deprecated it in favor of something more modern and useful.
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.
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.
While I agree with this, I'm also experiencing more bugs in Apple software than I ever have before, and it's really frustrating to see Apple shutting down the direct line of public feedback right in the middle of that.
I always heard iOS engineers pissed by Apple's lack of documentation, is there something actually more modern and useful ?
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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 :-)
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?)
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.
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.
Maybe it is time for Ask Different (Apple Stack Exchange) to make a comeback.
Same. I've almost never found my question actually answered there.
It was never good or useful.
Not for the past ten years at least.
It's been useless for its entire lifetime.
It's slightly better than the Windows support forum only because it doesn't hijack your browser navigation, and because most answers don't start with "Hello $name, I am Doug America, a fellow user like yourself! I am happy to assist your question."
Actually it's also slightly improved from the earlier days, where nearly every thread was 1) works for me, it must be your fault, 2) why do you even want to do that? 3) that's not a bug, that's working as designed, 4) you think you know better than Apple how your computer should work? 5) oh, so you just hate Apple software? You're a Micro$oft fanboy? 6) you didn't even run EtreCheck, and you're asking why you keep getting Kernel panics? Why are you even posting here? Etc.
Now, occasionally, when it shows up in my search results, there are answers rather than just berating OP. (Kinda like StackOverflow, at some point they must have realized that you can't just cede control of your forum to the most pedantic users on there)
i agree with worthless answers
or should i say...
[i have this problem too]
Like an LLM!
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.
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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 12–page thread of people having my same issue and no solution
That echos exactly my experience there. That or one post with a question, one reply asking for more information, and then nothing.
Every post I go to has
> This thread has been closed by the system or the community team
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.
> Small correction: proportional, not inversely proportional.
I edited my post. Thank you for catching this for me.
apple is very secretive about errors, pretty much impossible to find out what they mean
>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.
Microsoft in particular has this tendency to hire random people who have no idea what the product is about and let them loose on the forums to “answer” questions. You end up with a lot of -msft aliases replying complete nonsense.
Like a post about how chrome on windows doesn’t work with a DNS error, and the -msft person reply was instructions to go to the control panel and open IE settings and clear the cache. Like wth? Then they wait for few days, maybe ask if that solves the problem to no reply, then accept their own answer as an answer to resolve the post.
> 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
Followed by instructions on how to run sfc /scannow.
This is because Microsoft awards points to users who provide an 'accepted' answer, and you need enough points to keep your ranking.
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.
All those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain
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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.
Apple fanboyism is the worst kind of fanboyism. You can never argue with Apple fanboys, you just say “you are right” and move on.
I see this kind of vitriol much more often to be honest
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.
> I feel bad for the people who dedicated significant time to helping others there.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/*/https://discussions.apple.com/
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.
We should show grace for those who have changed and learned. We are all just human, after all.
Incomplete and not searchable.
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."
What format would you prefer the dataset in for consumption? A series of archives shared as magnet link torrents like Reddit? Open to suggestions.
https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift/blob/master/d...
https://academictorrents.com/
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
"You can just do things."
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.
It was presumably a fun part of their life and they won't be able to look at it anymore.
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.
Multiply this by thousands of contributors.
Tale as old as the internet. WoW player dumps 1000s of hours only to have their account rendered useless.
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!"
Brilliant! My favourite poem.
It’s a good reminder that it’s never your profile on someone’s platform. It’s their profile with your user handle. And their data.
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.
Strongly agree with this.
Multi-billion corps as well, by extension. :)
A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved
Which reflects badly on Apple. Closing a forum with such embarrassing entries is cheaper than fixing anything. Apple has become a ludicrous shit show.
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.
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No forums means no complaining users, which in turn means that their devices and software are perfect
Say what you will about Jobs, but his ability to avoid enshitification was legendary.
There was a lot about the eco system that was shit before jobs died. iMessage is a great example.
iMessage was brilliant and still is brilliant.
It’s anti-competitive and designed to create unnecessary lock in, which is the definition of enshitification
I don't think the 'enshittification' trend had really gotten off the ground at the time he was alive anyway...
TBF, this is useful in a way. At least you know what to expect.
They someone fix one thing and break another in Home every release. And iMessages.... what a piece of shit.
What’s wrong with iMessage?
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 johnsmith@icloud.com 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.
Also plenty of "Can Apple hardware do this?" with an official answer: "Absolutely not."
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.
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.
It was pretty useful to know when something got broken for more than just you. E.g like iPhone mirroring being absolutely unreliable.
Obviously there never way to fix it in Apple walled garden, but at least you knew if others have same issues,
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.
Apple has been speedrunning the "Corporate Soulless Behemoth" since about the time that SJ kicked the bucket. There's no community care to be found there for years, it's only a corporate thing doing crowd control at this point.
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.
enshitiffication.
we pay more, get less.
Was it worse than Microsoft Answers?
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.
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.
https://imgur.com/a/PhA5iT3
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.
I could never get my issue resolved by an Apple Engineer via the support forums anyway.
So doesn’t affect me after they shut this down.
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.
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.
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.
That forum was single handedly made relevant thanks to one person - Eskimo.
That guy is great: https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/nue9k3/who_...
Eskimo is Legend. They made the dev forums great as well. That is someone that I wish I could meet in real life just to properly thank them.
me too... I don't even know the guy, haven't met him in person, but hold him in very high regard.
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?
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.
There's also a ton of "fixes" which don't work.
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.
"It takes like 1.5 seconds from the gesture starts until a window on the target space gains focus."
It's even worse than that. If you don't lift your finger from the touchpad, the gesture never gets to the target space, no matter how long you wait. E.g. if you want to scroll something in the target space with the 2-finger scroll gesture, but your fingers touch down before the space-switching animation had fully finished, then the content in the target space won't receive the scroll gesture, no matter how long you wait. Your fingers must touch down after the - very gentle and slow - animation has fully played out.
FWIW there’s an app for that https://space-rabbit.app/
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.
Has anyone heard the real reason for this?
Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
Have worked with apple machines for over 20 years and have found little to no good information on this website. (Manage 1100 Apple devices)
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.
You must be superhumanly bad at using this class of tool. They work pretty well for troubleshooting, and can be told to share their sources. This has allowed me to fix all sorts of issues I wouldn't have been able to without 50+ minutes of searching.
For questions about Apple products, I've often had multiple models answer by websearching discussions.apple.com.
But the solutions on the Apple Support Community are often inaccurate, and I've often seen models confidently parrot those inaccurate solutions.
s/But/And/
Any examples of actual problems solved?
Anecdotally OTOH:
- Claude Code fixed a broken Xcode installation that caused strange linker errors
- Claude (demonstratably) removed spyware from and declutterd my grandmas’s computer
LLMs are great at hallucinating menu options that dont exist and entire features that dont exist just to get to the end. Have fun with that.
Have you used recent frontier models? They can troubleshoot and fix your machine themselves.
Not sure if good, but https://talk.macpowerusers.com/
MacRumors has the most active forum I know of.
Siri
It could be they ran Mythos on it, found a lot of bugs, and decided it wasn't worth patching.
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.
"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...
Something like 20 years ago when I was living in NYC, I was invited to the Apple Store in Chelsea to take part in a panel about the forums with Apple staff. I hadn't used them in years, but I had a lot of posts with upvotes or whatever it was.
Anyway, I don't remember anything about the panel, but afterwards they took us to this swanky restaurant with a huge charcuterie spread and an open bar. I remember commenting to one of the other participants that the wine was like $20.00+ per glass, with a bit of a cringe. An Apple employee overheard me and was like "don't worry about it, this is all on Apple!"
Pretty sure I drank like $1000.00 worth of wine that night, and I remember ending up in a cab with some Apple staff members who were in town from California, but I'm not sure if we carried on after that.
If anyone from Apple is reading this, maybe we should all get together for a debriefing/lessons learned now that it's all shutting down?
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!
Relative to profits, this forum costs Apple pennies to run what the hell :(
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.
That's good. Right now that site is just polluting search results with useless info. It used to be helpful back pre-2010s.
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.
We need to spin up ArchiveTeam Warrior ASAP
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Apple_Discussions
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Good. That place was a cesspit of wrong answers.
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.
Does anyone know if this includes the Apple Developer Forums or only the consumer community? The dev forums are one of the few places you sometimes get an answer from someone at Apple. Losing those would hurt a lot more than this.
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.
> It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.
I had the exact same thought when I saw the headline. For their purported use, both forums have bafflingly low signal-to-noise.
“trying to up their reply count” what’s the incentive for that?
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.
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%.
> there's probably a term for this
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.
People care about karma on this site. What's the incentive for that?
> what’s the incentive for that?
Everybody collects _something_.
> what’s the incentive for that
Clout is one hell of a thing
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.
>It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.
The infamous 'Run sfc /scannow' answer comes to mind. It never fixed the issue asked
Same deal with the “reset PRAM” on Macs suggested for all sorts of problems it has nothing to do with.
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.
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.
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.
Are you citing Stack Overflow as an example of good social interactions?
(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.
Not social, but technical. At some point in time, it really did have pretty good quality answers for my questions.
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.
You and I have had markedly different experiences with StackOverflow. It was better than Apple community forums, but man am I glad it’s dead.
Yes it’s better than the Apple forums. And if Apple put as much thought and care into their own forums, their forums could have been as good as Stack Overflow.
But, 50,000 posts saying "Have you tried resetting the PRAM and resetting the SMC?" are going to be deleted from the internet!
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.
Here's my summary of MS Answers.
"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. "
My favorite: “that’s not possible by default in the ecosystem, at best you can install third party software that kinda works”
Trying to get Mac is too stop recognizing my USB microphone as a speaker was infuriating. Half of my zoom calls defaulters to the mic as output.
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.
I’ve had a lot of helpful stuff, but also, lots of useless and dated stuff.
Frankly, StackOverflow has generally been more useful, but I know that LLMs frequently mine the Apple Support Forums for their answers.
and associated subReddits.
It's always been completely useless anyway. Never, EVER, got an answer from it.
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.
I'm pretty sad about this, so much knowledge is there and continues to be there. We can't rely on other 3rd party sites such as Reddit or Discord (even worse!) to store this data.
Shoutout to Quinn, who has made many incredibly helpful posts in these forums. Maybe some posts by others weren't as helpful, but Quinn's comments were great.
I miss Apple’s mailing lists. They were quite good back in the day.
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
isn't this pretty much every response from an LLM (probably trained on this shit)?
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
But Microsoft Answers did shut down last year?
EDIT: Seems like there is Microsoft Q&A now but it's a ghost town
when they're not trying to do the support scam - inbound marketing style!
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.
> tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places,
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 Apple? Probably not, never had an issue getting tech support from a real person that speaks my language fluently.
For companies where you have almost no hope of getting a human on the line? Sure.
Weird emphasis on language
Because getting support from someone you can barely communicate with is much harder.
I imagine normal users are going to ChatGPT now - and that it's far, far better than anything they would ever find on apple.com
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.
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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.
This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.
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.
> 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.
Oh no. Where will I go now to be told I'm doing it wrong, and asked, "Why would you even want to do that?"
Man, that handful of blessed dudes who spent decent portions of their lives and mental capital trying to earn "good karma" and up-votes on their freely delivered help and fixes.
Back to their workbenches, soldering irons in hand. Mac OS X 10.0 framed launch poster on the wall...
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.
Yeah I would do that too were my software quality going down the drain by the year
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.
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.
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)
For now…
I have to suspect that the developer forums are next.
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
I never quite understood the shilling of Etrecheck for more than a decade, to then berating the person who asked.
This was, without a doubt, the worst way to debug any MacOS or Mac hardware issues.
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?
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.
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.
I wonder if this will be a trend and we'll see Microsoft doing it next?
Hmm, could spark the contributions on Ask Different for a brief while.
Who knew families and communities closed ?
There needs to be a law something like false advertising that prevents dishonest misuse and misrepresentation of the words family and community.
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”.
This seems very sudden.
Could it be for cybersecurity reasons?
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.
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.
Good riddance.
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.
Link doesn't work, like everything Apple
Is this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?
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.
Or you got the Apple employee that got to have the E-slur as their username and email alias, apparently.
are they going to be offering a dump of the data?
Finally.
Why in the age of more and more slop in software development do companies close more and more avenues for getting feedback that could counter that a bit?
I always found very generic response in the Apple Support Community honestly
"...and nothing of value was lost"
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
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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.
[dead]
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.
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...
There are so many people who have their identities wrapped in that forum… just look at their post signature blocks.