Has anyone heard the real reason for this?

Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Siri

Have worked with apple machines for over 20 years and have found little to no good information on this website. (Manage 1100 Apple devices)

MacRumors has the most active forum I know of.

Not sure if good, but https://talk.macpowerusers.com/

Relative to profits, this forum costs Apple pennies to run what the hell :(

Those pennies probably got someone promoted.

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.

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.

> I don't remember the last time I found anything useful on there.

Ditto. I'm sure it was useful during the early years of Apple when they were a much smaller company with a much smaller community of users, but those days are long gone.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

It's always been completely useless anyway. Never, EVER, got an answer from it.

> 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.

There are so many people who have their identities wrapped in that forum… just look at their post signature blocks.

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.

I agree that many or perhaps even most 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 I found the Apple Support thread as the first result for Googling 'mac sonos stopped working'. 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 cringe and prepare for chaos 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 ArchiveTeam will care to scrape it before the 20th.

I always found very generic response in the Apple Support Community honestly

are they going to be offering a dump of the data?

We need to spin up ArchiveTeam Warrior ASAP

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Apple_Discussions

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.

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.

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.

Finally.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

I wonder if this will be a trend and we'll see Microsoft doing it next?

I never quite understood the shilling of Etrecheck for more than a decade, to then berating the person who asked.

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.

This seems very sudden.

Could it be for cybersecurity reasons?

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?

This was, without a doubt, the worst way to debug any MacOS or Mac hardware issues.