Apple is closing its Support Community on November 20

Apple put the Apple Support Community into read-only mode on Tuesday and will close the forums on Friday, November 20, according to MacRumors. New questions and answers are already impossible, and the volunteers who kept the place running were given no window to say goodbye.

The community is older than most of Apple’s current products. It ran as Apple Discussions before it took the Support Community name, and MacRumors quotes members who joined in November 2000 and July 2009, one of whom was invited into the Apple Community+ recognition programme launched in 2022.

What changed

Two dates, two states. Since Tuesday the site is read-only: threads are visible, replies are not possible. On November 20 the forums close.

That is the whole announcement as reported. It is not a migration to a new platform, and no replacement community is named.

What to save before Friday

If a thread has ever saved you an afternoon, keep it now, while it still loads normally.

• In Safari, File > Export as PDF on the thread. Replies stay in order and it takes a second per page.
• In any browser, Print > Save as PDF does the same with a different layout.
• Save the URL alongside. A PDF without the address is hard to trace back if the original disappears.

Search caches and the Wayback Machine may hold copies, but neither guarantees that a particular thread was archived, and neither replaces keeping the page you actually use.

Where questions go next

Two separate places, for two different kinds of question. Apple’s support site and the Apple Support app still handle account, purchase and hardware issues, with a chat or a call rather than a forum. The Apple Developer Forums are a different system, run for code-level questions, and this closure does not touch them.

Third-party Mac forums exist and some are busy, but recommending one is a judgement about moderation and answer quality that changes year to year. Search before joining, and check whether the answers you find are recent.

What the report does not say

MacRumors does not say whether the existing threads stay online after November 20, and no separate Apple statement about the archive is quoted. Treat the read-only period as the safe window: copy what you need rather than assuming the pages will still be there in December.