The Apple Support Community’s Closing Notice
On Tuesday, November 10, the Apple Support Community stopped taking new posts. The forum — where Apple users have swapped fixes, argued over settings and talked each other through broken devices for 28 years — is now read-only. On Friday, November 20, it closes for good.
That much is certain. What happens to everything inside it is not. Apple has not said whether the decades of threads will be archived, preserved in some other form, or switched off with the forum. The notice on the site says nothing about it at all.
The notice, posted on the community site itself, reads in full:
“The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.”
The final public post landed at 5:49 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, according to MacRumors. The Verge, publishing on November 11 in Europe, described the read-only change as starting that day — the same event, seen across the timezone difference. Since then the doors have been closing in stages: the sign-in button now leads to an internal Apple employee login page, so regular members cannot get back into their accounts to post, per 9to5Mac via MacObserver. The forum can still be read — for now.
Twenty-eight years of answers
The community’s history goes back to 1998, when it launched as the Apple Tech Exchange. It became Apple Discussions in 2000, was relaunched as Apple Support Communities in April 2011, and took its current name, Apple Support Community, in 2022. Roughly 28 years, start to finish.
The 2011 relaunch brought the points and levels system: ten levels, from Level 1 at 0 points to Level 10 at 80,000 points.
That is what makes the closure more than a website shutting down. For nearly three decades, the forum was where Apple users exchanged advice, troubleshot problems, and chatted about Apple products. It was a library its readers built for each other, one thread at a time, and Apple has not said whether the library survives in any form. If the posts are not preserved, losing the forum would mean losing that accumulated record of solved problems, not just a place to ask new ones.
What Apple said — and what it didn’t
Apple told MacRumors it decided to sunset the community “after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.” That is the whole explanation on the record. No usage figures, no statement that the forum was declining, no detail on what the evaluation weighed.
Nor has Apple named a replacement. The closing notice directs users to the official Apple Support site for “trusted guidance and support,” and nothing else. There is no new forum, no successor platform, no migration plan mentioned anywhere in the announcement.
To be fair, a 28-year-old forum accumulates problems of its own. Advice written for software versions from a decade ago can be stale, wrong, or even insecure today, and a curated official support site may serve most users better than searching decades of threads. The decision may also reflect declining forum use — Apple said it followed “a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs” — but Apple gave no figures, so whether use was declining, and by how much, is not something the record establishes. Apple may also preserve the posts internally, or migrate useful content to the official Support site — the absence of a public statement is not proof of deletion.
But the only reporting on the question suggests otherwise. A MacRumors senior reporter said he was told to expect the forums to be entirely removed after November 20. That is a reported expectation, not an Apple statement — and it is exactly the gap in the record that matters. Ten days separate the forum going read-only from its permanent closure, and in that window Apple has said nothing about archiving, nothing about deep links and bookmarks pointing at old threads, and nothing about what happens to members’ accumulated points and levels.
What users can do now
For anyone still looking for peer help, MacRumors notes the alternatives include the MacRumors Forums and Reddit, and customers can continue to contact Apple Support directly. Apple has not said whether the threads, or the points members accumulated, carry over to any of them. Because continued access after the closure is uncertain, members who want to keep a thread should save what matters to them while the pages are still readable.
The questions Apple has left open are simple ones: will the posts be preserved, archived, or deleted — and what happens to the links pointing at them? How much of the forum’s content is not covered by Apple’s official support pages at all? And what, exactly, did “strategy and customer needs” mean, when no numbers were given? It is also unclear whether the November 10 notice was the first announcement members received, or whether they had any earlier warning that the end was coming.
For now there is only the notice, the read-only pages, and a date. A library users built for each other is closing on November 20, and nobody has said whether the books survive the building. The forum’s read-only pages are all that remains of a 28-year conversation, and whether they stay readable after the closure is still unannounced.
