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# Apple Is Shutting Down Its Support Community Forums on November 20. Save the Threads You Need
- URL: https://www.techbetweenthelines.com/apple-support-community-closing/
- Published: 2026-11-11T15:03:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-12T00:54:54.000Z
- Description: The Apple Support Community stopped taking posts on November 10 and closes for good on November 20. What Apple has said, what it has not, and how to save the threads you still need.
- Author: Justin Scharlemann
- Tags: Apps & Services, Apple, #news-desk

****Update, November 11:** Apple has confirmed to [**AppleInsider*](https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/11/11/apple-support-communities-were-sound-and-fury-but-sometimes-so-useful?ref=techbetweenthelines.com) that the forums will be taken completely offline on November 20, not kept as a read-only archive. If a thread there matters to you, save a copy before then.

If you've ever pasted an error message into a search engine and landed on a thread at discussions.apple.com, that page has an end date. Apple will permanently close the Apple Support Community on Friday, November 20, 2026, according to a notice posted at the top of the site. The forums stopped accepting new posts on the evening of Tuesday, November 10, and everything there stays read-only until the shutdown.

The notice thanks the members who gave their time and expertise to the forums and sends everyone to the official Apple Support site instead. Apple told [MacRumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/10/apple-support-community-closing-november-20/?ref=techbetweenthelines.com) it made the call after "a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs." As of publication, Apple hasn't said whether the existing threads survive in any form after November 20, and its pages about the community don't mention an archive or what happens to the points and levels members spent years earning.

## What goes away with it

The forums are older than the iPod. Apple started them in 1998 as the Apple Tech Exchange, and MacRumors counts three renames since then. That's 28 years of answers from owners helping owners, and a lot of it is the kind of help Apple's own support articles were never going to cover: a workaround for an older Mac Apple no longer updates, or a thread where a crowd of owners confirms the same bug long before Apple says a word about it.

Apple's support documents are good at the common problems. The forums were where the strange ones got solved, usually by volunteers whose only reward was points and a level badge. Apple's notice doesn't offer a replacement for that kind of peer help. It points to Apple's documentation and Apple's staff.

## What to do before November 20

If a forum thread ever fixed something for you, or you keep one bookmarked for a problem that comes back, save a copy before November 20\. On a Mac, open the thread in Safari and choose File > Export as PDF. On iPhone or iPad, tap Safari's Share button, tap Options, choose PDF, then pick Save to Files. Don't count on finding it later through search, because once the pages come down, the search results that point to them will lead nowhere.

For new problems, Apple's own routes are the Apple Support app, where you can chat with an advisor, set up a call or book a repair, and the contact options at support.apple.com. For hardware, Apple still takes repair appointments through the app and its stores. For the owner to owner help the forums used to provide, Reddit's r/applehelp and the larger Apple enthusiast forums are still open for posting.

If what you're seeing is a bug in iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27, add it to our [Problems and Fixes tracker](https://www.techbetweenthelines.com/ios-27-problems-and-fixes/). When enough readers report the same thing, it gets its own card with what we know and any workaround, and we file it with Apple.

The timing is awkward. According to MacRumors, the last post went up at 5:49 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, November 10, a little over an hour after Apple's [93 minute iCloud outage](https://www.techbetweenthelines.com/icloud-outage-november-10-2026/) ended. An outage like that is when a lot of people go looking for others with the same problem, and Apple's status page lists services, not symptoms.

On November 20, watch what happens to the archive. Leaving the old threads up as a read-only library is one option. Deleting 28 years of answers that still turn up in search results would hurt plenty of owners who never posted there, and Apple hasn't said which way it's going.