Apple has quietly pulled the plug on one of its oldest online services. The Apple Support Community, the user-to-user forum where iPhone, Mac and iPad owners have helped each other fix problems since 1998, is now read-only, and it will disappear for good on Friday, November 20, 2026.
Visitors to discussions.apple.com now see a short notice at the top of every page: the community will permanently close on November 20, and starting November 10 the site no longer accepts new posts and is available in read-only mode. Apple thanked members for the time and expertise they contributed, and pointed everyone to the official Apple Support site instead.
That gives regulars eight days to save anything they still need. There is no export tool, and Apple has not said whether the archive of nearly three decades of answers will stay online after the 20th.
Read-only since November 10, gone on November 20
The shutdown was abrupt. Apple flipped the switch on Tuesday, November 10, and the final message posted to the site appears to have been submitted at 5:49 p.m. Pacific Time that evening, according to MacRumors.
You can still browse and search the forum, and the “Me too” and voting buttons still work. What you cannot do is start a new question or reply to an existing thread. The sign-in button now leads to an internal AppleConnect login page, which means ordinary members cannot get back into their accounts at all, 9to5Mac found.
Apple told MacRumors it decided to sunset the community “after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.” It has not said anything more in public about the reasoning, and The Register reports Apple has not responded to its request for comment either.
A forum that predates the iPhone by nine years
The community launched in 1998 as the Apple Tech Exchange, back when Apple was winding down the Newton and launching Mac OS 8.5. The iPhone would not exist for another nine years. Over 28 years it became the first place many Apple owners looked when something went wrong, and a deep archive of fixes that search engines still surface today.
The closure covers the non-English communities too. MacRumors reports that versions in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish will meet the same fate, even though the French and German pages had not yet shown closure notices when the story broke.
Apple has also said nothing about the community points system. Its own guide lists ten levels, from Level 1 at zero points to Level 10 at 80,000 points, and there is no badge, credit or replacement recognition announced for the members who earned them, The Mac Observer notes.
No export button, and no word on the archive
The part that matters most for anyone who relies on the forum is also the least clear. Apple offers no tool to download your posts or the threads you bookmarked, and the closing notice says nothing about whether the archive will stay up as a read-only reference or vanish entirely on November 20.
Fast Company, which called the closure abrupt but understandable, put it plainly: as of its reporting, all posts were still available to browse, but presumably all of them will be wiped from discussions.apple.com on November 20. Apple has not confirmed that either way, so the safe assumption is that anything you have not saved yourself could be gone.
What to save before November 20
If you have threads you return to, save them now, by hand, while the site is still readable:
- Open each thread you rely on and save it as a PDF. In Safari, choose File, then Export as PDF; in Chrome or Edge, use Print and choose Save as PDF. Do the whole thread, not just the first page, since the accepted answer is often several replies down.
- Check your bookmarks and browser history. Search for discussions.apple.com links you have saved over the years, including old fixes for printers, Wi-Fi, iCloud sync and battery drain that still work.
- Save your own posts and solutions. If you wrote a fix that other people thanked you for, keep a copy, since your account and its points history will go with the site.
- Screenshot anything with screenshots. Threads that walk through a settings screen step by step lose most of their value as plain text, so capture the images too.
It is worth doing this even if you only visit the forum occasionally. Twenty-eight years of troubleshooting covers problems that Apple’s own support pages never documented, from legacy Mac software to quirks in specific iOS releases.
Where Apple users go for help now
Apple’s notice points everyone to support.apple.com, where its own articles and the option to contact Apple Support live. For the community side of things, MacRumors suggests its own forums and Reddit as the closest replacements, and both already host large Apple help communities.
The timing is awkward for iPhone owners in particular. iOS 27.3 is in beta, with Siri gaining access to health data and StandBy clock faces reaching older iPhones, and the iOS 27.2.1 security update only landed on November 9. New software means new questions, and for the first time in 28 years, Apple’s own forum will not be there to answer them.
Apple built the Support Community when the web was young and kept it running through the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and the Apple silicon transition. It closes on November 20 with a banner and a thank-you note. If any part of it was useful to you, save it this week, because after the 20th there may be nothing left to save.
