The Apple Support Community has been shut down

Yesterday, Apple unexpectedly shut down the Apple Support Community. Participation had been dropping noticeably in recent months. Most likely, this was due to people switching to AI chatbots for help. This was not unexpected. But it was abrupt and came with no warning.

What does this mean for EtreCheck? I have no idea. Obviously, EtreCheck was the “go to” technical support tool for the Apple Support Community. Without people asking for EtreCheck reports, no one will know that EtreCheck even exists.

There are other Apple-focused Internet discussion forums. But none of these are dedicated to technical support. And none of them are as friendly to EtreCheck reports as the Apple Support Community was.

EtreCheck 7 is still in development. It will be a radically new design that should really help Mac users who now find themselves all on their own. I would have liked to have released EtreCheck 7 before the Apple Support Community shut down. A preview release of EtreCheck 7 will be available in a few weeks.

EtreCheck 6 still works great on every version of macOS from 10.13 “High Sierra” to 27 “Golden Gate”. EtreCheck 6 will soon be updated to remove links and references to the Apple Support Community.

Probably the biggest loss from the Apple Support Community will be the ability to learn what common problems people are having. For example, storage problems have become very common in the past few years. Etresoft released a dedicated tool, Storeograph, just to help people with this one problem. In the future, it will be much more difficult to identify major problems like this.

When I first released EtreCheck, I was concerned about being inundated with e-mails from people asking for help with their computer or to review their EtreCheck reports. That never happened. I get very few tech support messages. Going forward, I will need more feedback from EtreCheck users to understand what kinds of problems people are having and what kinds of help people need.

I will always be grateful to the other helpers on the Apple Support Community who recommended my apps and used those EtreCheck reports to help other people. EtreCheck was designed to be a tool to help them help you. Now, I’m on my own too, just like you.