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.
It was pretty useful to know when something got broken for more than just you. E.g like iPhone mirroring being absolutely unreliable.
Obviously there never way to fix it in Apple walled garden, but at least you knew if others have same issues,
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
> 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.
Was it worse than Microsoft Answers?
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.
enshitiffication.
we pay more, get less.
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 groan that Apple hadn't bothered to document it and cringe as you prepared for the chaos you anticipated 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 Archive Team will care to scrape it before the 20th.
Has anyone heard the real reason for this?
Does anyone know of any good alternatives that actually work? And please don’t suggest Reddit.
Have worked with apple machines for over 20 years and have found little to no good information on this website. (Manage 1100 Apple devices)
MacRumors has the most active forum I know of.
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.
For questions about Apple products, I've often had multiple models answer by websearching discussions.apple.com.
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.
LLMs are great at hallucinating menu options that dont exist and entire features that dont exist just to get to the end. Have fun with that.
Have you used recent frontier models? They can troubleshoot and fix your machine themselves.
Relative to profits, this forum costs Apple pennies to run what the hell :(
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.
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It's always been completely useless anyway. Never, EVER, got an answer from it.
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.
Link doesn't work, like everything Apple
Is this the useless thing where you posted bugs and Apple ignored you?
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.
Or you got the Apple employee that got to have the E-slur as their username and email alias, apparently.
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.
There are so many people who have their identities wrapped in that forum… just look at their post signature blocks.