Apple Support Community to Close on November 20 After 28 Years

Apple is shutting down one of its oldest online services. The Apple Support Community, the user-to-user help forum where Apple customers have answered each other's questions about iPhones, Macs and everything in between, will permanently close on Friday, November 20, 2026.

A notice now sits at the top of every page of the forum at discussions.apple.com. It reads: "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."

The notice went up on Tuesday, November 10, so the forum has already stopped taking new questions and replies. Visitors can still browse and search the old threads, but the community that kept the site alive is, in effect, already gone.

What has already changed

The read-only switch came with no advance warning. According to MacRumors, the final message posted to the site appears to have been submitted at 5:49 p.m. Pacific Time on November 10, just before the forum locked down.

Members trying to sign in have found the front door closed as well. The Sign in button now leads to an internal AppleConnect login page labelled "AC Communities Web – Internal", according to 9to5Mac, which suggests the back end is now limited to Apple employees. Regular members have no way back into their accounts.

The voting and "Me too" buttons still work, according to reports, but nothing new can be posted. The notice points users to the official Apple Support site for help, and thanks community members "who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products."

A 28-year history

The forums have existed in some form for nearly 30 years. Apple launched its first forum-based community support site, the Apple Tech Exchange, in 1998. It became Apple Discussions in 2000, then the Apple Support Communities in 2011, before taking on the current Apple Support Community name in 2022.

Across those decades the forum grew into one of the largest repositories of Apple troubleshooting knowledge anywhere on the internet — millions of threads in which owners, enthusiasts and occasionally Apple employees worked through problems that official support documents never covered. For many users it was the first place to look when something went wrong, and often the only place where an obscure fix existed at all.

What Apple has said — and what it has not

Apple told MacRumors it decided to retire the forum after "a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs." The company has not publicly explained the decision beyond that, and the closure notice itself gives no reason.

What Apple has not said may matter more. The notice says nothing about whether the decades of threads will stay online as an archive or disappear entirely on November 20. It also says nothing about the points and levels long-time members earned over the years — the community's own guide lists ten levels, from Level 1 at zero points up to Level 10 at 80,000 points — and no badge, credit or replacement recognition has been announced.

There is also no export tool. Apple's notice offers no way to download your own posts, and neither the community's use agreement nor its points guide mentions one. Anyone who relies on a particular thread would be wise to save it before the deadline — on a Mac, for example, by exporting the page as a PDF from the browser's print menu.

Where Apple users can go next

Apple's own support channels are unaffected by the closure: the Apple Support website, the Apple Support app, phone support and Genius Bar appointments at Apple Stores all continue as normal. The company is steering forum users toward those official routes.

Peer-to-peer help is not disappearing entirely — it is just moving elsewhere. Community forums such as the MacRumors Forums and Reddit remain active places where Apple users trade fixes, and they are the most likely homes for the kind of detailed, user-tested troubleshooting the Apple Support Community used to host.

For now, the archive is still there to read. But with no word from Apple on what happens after November 20, the safe assumption is that the site goes dark on that date — and with it, 28 years of answers written by the people who used the products every day.

Sources

• MacRumors — November 20 to Mark the End of an Era at Apple
• MobileSyrup — Apple is closing its 28-year-old community forum
• The Mac Observer — Apple Support Community ends November 20: what happens to your posts and points
• Fast Company — Apple Support Community shutdown: Why closing it makes sense