LLMs. I’d be surprised if there’s a tech support problem they can’t solve. If so, it’s probably so interesting you can write a blog post about it and/or post it to HN.
I have yet to encounter the tech problem they can solve. LLMs really suck at troubleshooting, they love to go on esoteric tangents that are unlikely to succeed and then get hung up there.
You must be superhumanly bad at using this class of tool. They work pretty well for troubleshooting, and can be told to share their sources. This has allowed me to fix all sorts of issues I wouldn't have been able to without 50+ minutes of searching.
People dont come to forums to praise how amazing Apple products are. They come to complain about issues and about "free trial" services being activated for them without their knowledge in Apple Stores.
Bad look for Apple. No public forums -> no public complaints.
My gosh I don't remember the last time I found anything useful on there. It feels like every response is someone telling OP that Apple doesn't read those forums, and directing them how to file feedback. Sad though to see Apple pull further away from their community.
> I don't remember the last time I found anything useful on there.
Ditto. I'm sure it was a valuable resource during the earlier years of Apple when they were a much smaller company with a much smaller community of users, but those days are long gone.
They pretty religiously purged posts that were evidence of anything confirmed vulnerable, such as the many instances of malformed media files causing icloud and then the devices to do increasingly insecure things
sounds like Apple is trying to get customers to perform their support duties. Same thing with Microsoft, Dell, Nvidia, etc. Saves them a ton of money not having to actually provide real support.
Apple has been speedrunning the "Corporate Soulless Behemoth" since about the time that SJ kicked the bucket. There's no community care to be found there for years, it's only a corporate thing doing crowd control at this point.
It’s the thing where you posted bugs, Apple ignored you, and you got hectored by 60 year old self-declared technical experts from the flyover who would ask you 30 questions before telling you you were holding it wrong.
Link works just fine for those wondering if it's down already.
I'm glad they are shutting this down, I hope the also switch off the site entirely so search engines don't link to it. It was mostly junk with people posting anecdotal recipes for making things work. It may have been a useful place to find information maybe 15 years ago, but the SNR ratio even then was bad. Good riddance.
> We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
Why even offer this hollow patronizing comment?
If you want to thank them, actually thank them with some token of appreciation other than a single, anonymous passive-voice remark in an announcement banner when they go to login to help others.
I wonder if there's a market for a public bug tracker to track things in say, Microsoft Teams, that then goes and doxxes the person at the company who's on the team that could actually fix it. Or trying to get hired by that company so you can go in and fix that bug and then quit.
I agree that many or even the majority of posts were not helpful.
But there were some long-lasting OS flaws and third-party app frictions where the workaround was helpfully posted on this site. As an example, every time MacOS updated, Sonos would stop working. Privacy & Security --> Local Network --> Toggle the permission for "Sonos" off. Wait. Toggle it back on. Fixed. (While doing this, you'll also notice Google's workaround of adding fresh entries here on each update of Chrome.) I think before Googling 'mac sonos stopped working' I checked if the Sonos app had permissions and the OS reporting that it did is how I got stumped. A Google search and 30 seconds in one of these threads later and I learned the truth about the toggle on state. It seemed like an embarrassing workaround to leave necessary for a year but Apple seemed to be okay with this solution mentioned here and no where else.
Additionally, some phrases that you knew existed inside Apple products (like app store URL parameters or a Safari feature flag maybe) you might search as "site:apple.com DisablePNGTransparency" and the only result would be on discussions.apple.com and, yes, you would cringe and prepare for chaos in the thread. But you still appreciated that you weren't the first user to be looking for information about the term, you hadn't dreamt it.
I wonder if ArchiveTeam will care to scrape it before the 20th.
Easily one of the most useless cesspools on the internet. Over 30 years I’m not sure I ever found a single helpful answer on there. It was no better than Microsoft’s community support site, and that one was weird SEO spam 80% of the time.
The Developer Forums are great, and I've had direct responses from engineers to help fix my issues, and in the last few months too. It's alive.
The standard community forum, however, should have been put to sleep years ago, its only function is to clog up the internet with half-truths, unanswered problems, and outdated workarounds.
There are so so many bugs in OS X and it's up to the users to ferret them out. Many years ago when I upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, my external Firewire drive suddenly wouldn't even appear as a device, Apple was of no help. Turned out that the Oxford Firewire chip inside of the drive (OX911, an ominous chip name) needed an update and thankfully there was a Java based updater that did the trick. I never would have found that out without the Apple Support Community.
Hope somebody clones the site but I see it's protected by anti-crawler software now, thanks scrapers.
Does anyone know if this includes the Apple Developer Forums or only the consumer community? The dev forums are one of the few places you sometimes get an answer from someone at Apple. Losing those would hurt a lot more than this.
I'm pretty sad about this, so much knowledge is there and continues to be there. We can't rely on other 3rd party sites such as Reddit or Discord (even worse!) to store this data.
Something like 20 years ago when I was living in NYC, I was invited to the Apple Store in Chelsea to take part in a panel about the forums with Apple staff. I hadn't used them in years, but I had a lot of posts with upvotes or whatever it was.
Anyway, I don't remember anything about the panel, but afterwards they took us to this swanky restaurant with a huge charcuterie spread and an open bar. I remember commenting to one of the other participants that the wine was like $20.00+ per glass, with a bit of a cringe. An Apple employee overheard me and was like "don't worry about it, this is all on Apple!"
Pretty sure I drank like $1000.00 worth of wine that night, and I remember ending up in a cab with some Apple staff members who were in town from California, but I'm not sure if we carried on after that.
If anyone from Apple is reading this, maybe we should all get together for a debriefing/lessons learned now that it's all shutting down?
Man, that handful of blessed dudes who spent decent portions of their lives and mental capital trying to earn "good karma" and up-votes on their freely delivered help and fixes.
Back to their workbenches, soldering irons in hand. Mac OS X 10.0 framed launch poster on the wall...
54 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 11.1 ms ] threadDoes anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
- Claude Code fixed a broken Xcode installation that caused strange linker errors
- Claude (demonstratably) removed spyware from and declutterd my grandmas’s computer
Bad look for Apple. No public forums -> no public complaints.
Ditto. I'm sure it was a valuable resource during the earlier years of Apple when they were a much smaller company with a much smaller community of users, but those days are long gone.
Obviously there never way to fix it in Apple walled garden, but at least you knew if others have same issues,
we pay more, get less.
Is this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?
I'm glad they are shutting this down, I hope the also switch off the site entirely so search engines don't link to it. It was mostly junk with people posting anecdotal recipes for making things work. It may have been a useful place to find information maybe 15 years ago, but the SNR ratio even then was bad. Good riddance.
Why even offer this hollow patronizing comment?
If you want to thank them, actually thank them with some token of appreciation other than a single, anonymous passive-voice remark in an announcement banner when they go to login to help others.
But there were some long-lasting OS flaws and third-party app frictions where the workaround was helpfully posted on this site. As an example, every time MacOS updated, Sonos would stop working. Privacy & Security --> Local Network --> Toggle the permission for "Sonos" off. Wait. Toggle it back on. Fixed. (While doing this, you'll also notice Google's workaround of adding fresh entries here on each update of Chrome.) I think before Googling 'mac sonos stopped working' I checked if the Sonos app had permissions and the OS reporting that it did is how I got stumped. A Google search and 30 seconds in one of these threads later and I learned the truth about the toggle on state. It seemed like an embarrassing workaround to leave necessary for a year but Apple seemed to be okay with this solution mentioned here and no where else.
Additionally, some phrases that you knew existed inside Apple products (like app store URL parameters or a Safari feature flag maybe) you might search as "site:apple.com DisablePNGTransparency" and the only result would be on discussions.apple.com and, yes, you would cringe and prepare for chaos in the thread. But you still appreciated that you weren't the first user to be looking for information about the term, you hadn't dreamt it.
I wonder if ArchiveTeam will care to scrape it before the 20th.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Apple_Discussions
Good riddance.
The standard community forum, however, should have been put to sleep years ago, its only function is to clog up the internet with half-truths, unanswered problems, and outdated workarounds.
Hope somebody clones the site but I see it's protected by anti-crawler software now, thanks scrapers.
There needs to be a law something like false advertising that prevents dishonest misuse and misrepresentation of the words family and community.
Anyway, I don't remember anything about the panel, but afterwards they took us to this swanky restaurant with a huge charcuterie spread and an open bar. I remember commenting to one of the other participants that the wine was like $20.00+ per glass, with a bit of a cringe. An Apple employee overheard me and was like "don't worry about it, this is all on Apple!"
Pretty sure I drank like $1000.00 worth of wine that night, and I remember ending up in a cab with some Apple staff members who were in town from California, but I'm not sure if we carried on after that.
If anyone from Apple is reading this, maybe we should all get together for a debriefing/lessons learned now that it's all shutting down?
Back to their workbenches, soldering irons in hand. Mac OS X 10.0 framed launch poster on the wall...