Apple is closing its 28-year-old Support Community forum on November 20, and won't say where the old answers go
Started in 1998 as the Apple Tech Exchange, the forum is where owners swapped fixes for problems Apple's own help pages never covered.
You can still read the Apple Support Community this week. You just can’t ask it anything. As of November 11, the forum is read-only, and a banner on the site says it “will permanently close on November 20, 2026.”
The banner’s wording is worth quoting in full, because it is the entire announcement. “Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.” That is a thank-you note for a funeral, delivered nine days ahead.
The forum goes back to 1998, when it launched as the Apple Tech Exchange, according to The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed. It has been renamed several times since. Through all of them it did one job: ordinary owners answering each other’s questions, often the weird ones (the Wi-Fi that drops after one specific update, the battery that dies at 40 percent) that a support article written by the company never gets around to.
Apple told MacRumors it made the call “after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs,” per The Verge. Nobody outside Apple knows what the evaluation found. What Apple has not said is what happens to the archive. The Verge’s read is blunt: “Presumably, they’ll all disappear with it.” Apple didn’t answer the outlet’s request for comment before publication.
That silence is the whole story for anyone who has ever landed on a forum thread at 11 p.m. with a dead Mac. Those threads are the part of the Support Community that kept working after the humans stopped checking in. A 2013 answer to a 2013 problem still ranks in search results because nobody deleted it. If the site simply vanishes on the 20th, every one of those links turns into an error page, and the next person with the same problem starts from zero.
The threads that matter most may already live somewhere else. Reddit communities, independent forums and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine tend to hold copies of anything people kept linking to. The Wayback Machine won’t have everything, though, and Apple has made no promise about leaving the site crawlable in its last days.
A forum that survived 28 years is going out without a single new post.