Decades of Mac and iPhone Support History May Vanish on November 20
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An iconic piece of Apple history is shutting down this month. As of last night, users visiting the Apple Support Community discussion forums are being informed that the platform will officially close nine days from now, on November 20, 2026.
The Apple Support Community has already stopped accepting new posts and gone into a read-only mode, so we can only assume “permanently close” means that it’s slated to go completely offline next Friday, suggesting it won’t even be available for reference — at least not officially.
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.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
Apple hasn’t said what will happen after November 20. In a brief statement to MacRumors, an Apple spokesperson said only that the decision was made “after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.”
Much of its content will likely remain available via the Internet Archive for posterity, although that repository isn’t quite as easy to search as the Apple Support Community or Google, which had indexed most of the pages but will undoubtedly see those results vanish in the coming weeks.
The Apple Support Community we know today officially launched as a plural version of that name a little over 15 years ago, in April 2011, but its history goes back considerably further. It began its life as Apple Tech Exchange in 1998, just after Steve Jobs returned to the company and unveiled the original iMac. In early 2000, the site was renamed Apple Discussions as the company transitioned to Mac OS X and released the iPod.
While the web design evolved gradually throughout that decade, April 2011 represented a significant rebranding and redesign when it was relaunched as “Apple Support Communities.” Apple retained “discussions.apple.com” as the hostname to preserve the decade of Google search juice, while also adding personalized member profiles, “Solved” and “Helpful” post markers, and even a bit of gamification with reputation points and a leveling system.
Beyond basic moderation and Apple Community Specialists — staffers who stepped in solely to post links to support articles when threads went unanswered for 24 hours — Apple employees rarely provided direct technical troubleshooting in the forums, which sometimes confused new users looking for formal support. Instead, Apple relied on volunteer contributors, rewarding them with points to unlock perks like dedicated private lounges and invitations to the exclusive Apple Community+ program.
In 2022, Apple tweaked the name to the singular “Apple Support Community,” but it continued on mostly unchanged. Since then, it’s remained a library for arcane Apple knowledge, with posts going back to at least July 2005 (thread 117594 being the lowest number that still seems to return a result).
What’s going to become of all that is anyone’s guess at this point, but we can certainly hope Apple finds some way to preserve this beyond what the Wayback Machine offers. That said, the search features in the Apple Support Community were never great at ferreting out old information unless you were looking for very specific topics, like the names of ancient versions of Mac OS X. Still, I suspect many folks simply relied on Google, which had done a pretty good job of indexing nearly everything there.
Since Apple hasn’t announced a replacement for community-based discussions, it seems the company is likely content to just let users drift over to other spots like Reddit when they want to discuss things, and leave the standard Apple Support site (and app) as a static repository of official help documentation.
