Apple Support Community closes in six days after turning read-only

Apple users have six days left before the company’s Support Community permanently closes on November 20. The forum already accepts no new posts and remains available only for reading. The announcement was reported on November 10 in the US, leaving a ten-day interval between the decision becoming public and the shutdown. For people who have bookmarked a useful troubleshooting discussion, this is now a deadline to revisit it rather than a place to start another conversation.

The community was a forum for customers to help one another, distinct from a customer-service ticket system. According to MacRumors’ account of its history, Apple launched the Tech Exchange in 1998, renamed it Apple Discussions in 2000 and adopted Apple Support Communities in 2011. The current singular name arrived in 2022. That adds up to roughly 28 years of user discussions, spanning several generations of Macs and the arrival and evolution of devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

The closure notice remains at the top of the community homepage, thanking contributors and directing visitors to Apple’s main support website. Chinese publication Cailian Press also checked the site on November 11 and reported that existing discussions could be searched and read, but new questions and replies could not be added. Apple told MacRumors that the decision followed a review of strategy and customer needs.

A community discussion and a support article serve different purposes, much like a repair shop’s wall of customer notes and its official instruction manual. The manual supplies standard procedures; the notes can preserve an awkward combination of a particular model, software version and usage pattern. The community homepage still highlights user-written guides covering iPad generations and Apple Watch volume settings. The useful part of a discussion can be its sequence: how the fault was described, which attempted fixes failed and what finally worked. A static answer does not reproduce that entire exchange.

Apple’s main support website continues to offer product-help searches, account-password and subscription assistance, billing information and repair options. What is ending is this particular company-hosted space for customers to follow up with each other. Anyone who regularly returns to a saved troubleshooting thread can preserve the steps they need while the read-only page remains accessible. Keeping the model and operating-system version alongside those notes matters: a solution tied to one setup may not transfer unchanged to another.

Original source published: MacRumors, November 11, 2026, 11:50 Beijing time / November 10, 2026, 10:50 PM EST