Apple to Permanently Close 28-Year-Old Support Community Forum

What changed

Apple has made its 28-year-old Apple Support Community read-only and will permanently close it on November 20, 2026. The forum, which began in 1998 as Apple Tech Exchange, will stop accepting questions and direct users to Apple’s official Support site instead.

Why it matters

This removes a familiar layer of human troubleshooting from Apple’s support system. For years, users answered one another’s questions, with occasional help from Apple employees; now that volunteer knowledge base will no longer grow.

Apple says the decision follows an evaluation of its support strategy and customer needs. The practical test is whether official support can replace the quick, experience-based answers that users found in the community, especially when a problem was too specific for a standard help page.

The forum’s advice was never uniformly reliable. But its value was partly that users could compare fixes, describe odd failures and find conversations tied to particular devices. Apple’s next support model will make the official Support site the main destination, while the fate of existing discussions and the level of employee support remain unclear.