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> With education discount I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let
by tredre3 2y ago
> With education discount
I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.
- no_wizard 2y agoall you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses. That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable
- devmor 2y agoI’m going to have to check this out, I no longer have access directly to my old college email, but it still forwards to my gmail over a decade later!
- nicce 2y agoRegardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.
- redundantly 2y agoI've seen this FUD repeated for a long time. Hasn't happened yet. Probably the worst that will happen is they'll start requiring some type of verification again.
- addicted 2y agoThey almost certainly won’t get rid of it because people are abusing it. If they do it’s because they don’t want to offer it. If they want to end the abuse they will simply toughen the verification procedure.
- nicce 2y ago> They almost certainly won’t get rid of it because people are abusing it. It always depends on the ratio (valid cases vs abusers), if the amount of the abusers gets too high, then the discount is not correctly fulfilling its purpose. > If they want to end the abuse they will simply toughen the verification procedure. It also depends on how expensive or difficult it is to maintain such verification procedure. At some point it is not justified anymore. I just personally don't like the current attitude which seems to be going on. If you can "cheat" on getting the discount, people just keep finding reasons why they are justified to cheat. "They should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible". It happens everywhere. People get praised on finding such cheats. Even in Universities, people are encouraged to cheat on getting better grades with less work. Oh, clever boy! He used different LLMs with with good context that made the output look like his own writing. Not much different than saying "get a better lawyer", if you are getting punished for breaking the law. Opposite applies and that is why lawyers can be really expensive. Or, not much different than big tech doing morally questionable things because the law is lagging behind. "Nobody is not enforcing the law, so it is perfectly okay. Worst case is that we need to pay some fines.".
- derefr 2y agoIt's not cheating if they intend for you to do it (but just can't explicitly say it's allowed because then everyone would do it and that would collapse their self-assortative price-discrimination strategy.) > If you can "cheat" on getting the discount, people just keep finding reasons why they are justified to cheat. "They should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible". You seem to misunderstand the argument. It's not "they should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible." The argument is that they would toughen the verification procedure if cheating were possible and they cared; which proves, at the very least, that they don't care (and potentially proves that they in fact want you to do it, at least sometimes.) To be clear, this argument doesn't apply to bureaucracies — governmental, academic, or Enterprise — where there's so much red tape in the way of making changes that it's almost impossible to fix issues like this even if several people care quite a lot. But this argument very much does apply to a relatively-agile, not-so-Enterprise-y-for-its-size corporation like Apple. In fact, it applies especially to Apple, who has an almost Disney-like obsession with micromanaging all customer interactions as an extended customer-lifecycle marketing opportunity. (For example: you'll never find a rotting out-of-date page on an Apple-owned website.) Apple know exactly who they're giving this discount out to. They've almost assuredly sat down at least once and done a hand-analysis of one or more months' purchases, to determine the proportion of education-store purchases that are from genuine education customers. (Heck, they probably have gone far beyond this; far lazier corporations than Apple set up heuristics for this kind of "promotion fraud"; run continuous analyses on them; and spit out a weekly reports to mull over in marketing-KPIs progress meetings!) If Apple's education store gives discounts to group XYZ, then you can assume that that's the intended outcome. At least under the Apple marketing department's current paradigm of thought.
- tshaddox 2y agoIt's not like they're taking a loss from educational purchases. It's just price discrimination. You might as well say "if we all started using newspaper coupons we can say goodbye to those discounts."
- atonse 2y agoBut that IS actually true, that if everyone used a coupon, the coupon would eventually go away or become weaker. The expected percentage of people using a coupon is often part of the calculation (however vague) when deciding the coupon.
- cellwebb 2y agoLikewise, the expected percentage of people using the education discount is part of Apple's calculation. Even if they lose money on the device (which I personally think is unlikely), they'll make it back from subscriptions and their cut of app store purchases.
- nicce 2y agoIt is also an investment. Teachers promote/showcase the device for students. Students who buy the device earlier, might influence the choices in their future jobs.
- dangerlibrary 2y agoSheerID already exists and can differentiate between alumni and current students. Apple just needs to decide it's worth it (thus far, they haven't).
- derefr 2y agoPretty sure people already are abusing it. I think this is a lot like the situation with oldschool Photoshop: for a long time, people pirated Photoshop, and Adobe really didn't care — didn't bother to do anything to make piracy the least bit challenging. This was seemingly because they considered the amount of money they could make off of sales to individuals, to be relatively trivial next to the amount of money they could make off of corporate volume licensing; and they knew that corporations wouldn't be pirating Photoshop even if it was trivial (because corporations always have the thought of an acquisition-time assets audit on their minds.) Apple likely thinks the same way about this education discount: all their material income comes from volume purchases or alternate distribution channels (e.g. cellular carriers for phones), or in-store sales; with online retail sales being a relatively-trivial fraction. So it doesn't really matter if they're "losing" part of their margin on these online retail sales. (Or, if you think about it another way: this is essentially customer-driven price discrimination. Like coupons are for grocery stores. The discounted price is Apple's true price — the price that builds in a profit margin they're happy with. The higher price is pure gravy if they can convince people to part with it. They put the higher price front-and-center, and make the lower-priced offer a bit obscure. People "spending someone else's money" don't care about hunting for deals; they just want to get the thing and get out. So you can milk the gravy from them. People who hold their bank balance more dearly, hunt for the deal, and find it. Still fine; still made a profit from them!)
- nicce 2y ago> Apple likely thinks the same way about this education discount: all their material income comes from volume purchases or alternate distribution channels (e.g. cellular carriers for phones), or in-store sales; with online retail sales being a relatively-trivial fraction. So it doesn't really matter if they're "losing" part of their margin on these online retail sales. Exactly. At that point when the amount of abusers gets too high (because this will become mainstream knowledge and people think it is generally acceptable to dishonor the intention), then this will end. Or if they are able to improve the verification process with negligible costs. So, the more people talk about "educational price", and more think that is acceptable to "cheat", more likely the count of abusers reach that threshold and good things end. > (Or, if you think about it another way: this is essentially customer-driven price discrimination. Like coupons are for grocery stores. The discounted price is Apple's true price — the price that builds in a profit margin they're happy with. The higher price is pure gravy if they can convince people to part with it. They put the higher price front-and-center, and make the lower-priced offer a bit obscure. People "spending someone else's money" don't care about hunting for deals; they just want to get the thing and get out. So you can milk the gravy from them. People who hold their bank balance more dearly, hunt for the deal, and find it. Still fine; still made a profit from them!) You are finding again an excuse to cheat. It is perfectly okay to take an advantage of discount if you are eligible for that. But this was not the case.
- roughly 2y ago20 years ago I worked Apple retail and this was well known then.
- linhns 2y agoTbh, it's not that much compared to Apple sales.
- Foobar8568 2y agoIn Switzerland (Europe?) we can easily get cheaper price, from official resellers, than the edu price. Apple store won't match.
- mcv 2y agoDoes that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site. Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)
- giobox 2y agoThey have variations of the program in some European countries. It's been a long time for me, but in the UK they used to just whitelist university domains (we didn't use .edu TLDs either).
- nextos 2y agoAFAIK, in most of the EU they validate you are a student or an academic through UNiDAYS.
- OJFord 2y agoWe use .ac.uk though (and much of the non-USA world uses .ac.ccTLD similarly) so no need to whitelist individual university domains. I don't know about Apple, but that's a common approach. (And does irritate some where they don't use either and get missed, Canada for example.)
- jhugo 2y agoSome countries place no restrictions on registering domains under their .ac second level domain though.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- talldayo 2y ago> € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. "Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent [...] because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture." - Bob Borchers, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing (who apparently never heard of zram)
- Jtsummers 2y agoYou don't even need a .edu email address. I logged in with my regular Apple account and made a purchase on the education store expecting them to ask for that or some other verification, and they never did.
- WesleyJohnson 2y agoI can't confirm, but I had a Apple store employee tell me the same. And then I forgot to use it when I ordered my Mac Mini.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- macNchz 2y agoThey claim the right to audit purchases through the edu store and charge you the difference if you don't qualify, but I've never read anyone online reporting they've been audited/charged. https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/browse/open/salespolicies/edu#:~:text=Apple%20routinely%20audits%20the%20purchases,purchase%20conditions%20have%20been%20observed https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/browse/open/salespolicies/....
- Suppafly 2y ago>which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable Pay someone with an edu account to complete the purchase for you. Also, they are commonly available for community college students, including those taking free classes.
- stirlo 2y agoIt’s trivially easy to obtain the discount. Anyone working in education, or a student at any level, k-12, higher ed, graduates with access to uni email can get it. Apple doesn’t ask any questions or for verification. They also go on sale at a similar price to the general public relatively frequently.
- mp05 2y ago> Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? What makes you think that? I'm back in school getting a MEng degree in my 30s.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoI mean... surely that's not very common among HNers.
- bdangubic 2y agovery few on HN pay full price for Mac products ;)
- brailsafe 2y agoShush ;) But also a ton of people are absolutely in college, at any age, new people are coming to HN every day; I'd think HN is an easier place to discuss and explore vaguely tech/startup related topics than in school
- lupire 2y agoCorporate perks brokers and Amazon also give 15% off. But anyways, 15% is pretty much in the error fuzz range of "which platform do I like better" and "dominated by RAM upgrade price.
- icedchai 2y agoWe're all students of Internet University.
- mrtksn 2y agoA lot of people have a relative or something still in education, just buy it through them. It's not like this is government subsidy, just a promotion to increase sales and maybe hope to have long term customer by hooking them at younger age. Probably much less immoral than blocking ads on YouTube.
- yzydserd 2y agoIt seems viable that doing so increases the price for those of us who don't.
- mrtksn 2y agoWhy would that be?
- Arcuru 2y agoCompanies tend to focus on the overall % profit margin for a product. If a higher percentage of sales are for a discounted (edu) SKU with lower margins, they will tend to raise the price of the product to hit their desired profit margin. e.g. If a company was selling a product at $1000, and wanted to offer a 20% discount for EDU that would be bought by 50% of the market, they would need to raise the price by about 10% to keep the same margin. If only 20% of the market bought the discounted SKU, they could keep the same margins with only a 5% (?) increase in price to the rest of the SKUs.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- guhidalg 2y agoYou are free to purchase as many Apple products as you want to offset any perceived revenue losses from promotional discounts. I'm not so sure why you would want to do this but I keep hearing that behavioral economics is a thing, maybe paying more is your definition of rationality.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoThey use it because they have an inherent bias and want to put the Mac in a position to compare favorably.
- bliteben 2y agoEven Apple Store employees will freely give you the discount. Apple doesn't discount because they aren't a discount brand, but they will give you this discount if you ask.
- whyenot 2y agoTake a pottery course at community college. Pay $65 in tuition, get your education discount, and um, relive the scene from Ghost? :)
- okaram 2y agoBut a ton of us have a friend/kid/relative in HS or college ...
- wodenokoto 2y agoEducational discount is a pinky swear that you are a student or buying it for a student. So it is in practice available to everyone if you want to ruin nice things for students.
- solardev 2y agoDon't you usually need to verify somehow, like an .edu address?
- _mlbt 2y agoI am actually currently a college student, but I can confirm that Apple did nothing to verify that this was the case when I bought mine.
- gorbypark 2y agoCanada also does not verify, don't ask me how I know. However, where I live now (Spain) they do have some 3rd party service verifying edu status.
- aziaziazi 2y agoThe cheating/fraudulence encouragement in this thread is disgusting. You guys are not stilling a pencil but several hundreds dollars. Paying a part of it or apple being fatty rich doesn’t make it more honest. I don’t think I ever encounter here such collective encouragement to bypass a law (ok probably for jailbreak which is not a fraud). Not sure if the demography changes, societal culture change or just luck. Edit: Oh and yeas I never completed college, don’t own a .edu and am maybe just subconsciously jealous.
- Suppafly 2y ago>I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Or when they only use it to make the Apple pricing seem more favorable and ignore it when it comes to PC pricing. Most PC manufacturers also have educational pricing, whether directly or through some portal provided by your institution. I know my son's college had a deal and also had a list of the tax free days in the state so that you could pre-order and then pay and pick up on the day the tax didn't apply.
- 4ggr0 2y ago> tax free days in the state i'm sorry, tax free days?!? am i too european to understand this? does this apply to everything, like groceries, tech, flowers, wood etc., or just corporate transactions?
- dugmartin 2y agoI can't say for all states but here in Massachusetts we have an annual tax free weekend where sales tax (6.25%) is not applied for "most retail items of up to $2,500, purchased in Massachusetts for personal use" (https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-sales-tax-holiday-frequently-asked-questions https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-sales-tax-ho...). Also groceries never have a sales tax in Massachusetts but, again, that varies by state.
- 4ggr0 2y ago> tax free weekend where sales tax (6.25%) is not applied that's such a strange concept for me. i wonder what the historic reasoning there is for it, as it seems like one of those legacy things which were started to increase sales during difficult market times :D > Also groceries never have a sales tax in Massachusetts also interesting :) what i knew was that some or most states display the prices without tax, so you'll only know the total of your grocery trip at the checkout. never seen this here over the pond, prices always include taxes. what's common is that different things are taxed differently. food and beverages have lower tax than non-essential things, except of course if the beverages contain alcohol, etc. yada yada blabla.
- yalok 2y agoIt may be a local thing in Bay area, but usually there’s some way to get some discount when making a purchase with Apple - be it via education, or via a corporate discount (just show your badge from another company), or via a friend who works at Apple, or some big retailers start selling at good discount (eg Amazon easily gets 5-10% lower price over time). Anecdotally, last week I visited a local Apple Store with my son who is in middle school. Without any prompting from us, the Apple rep asked my son if he is planning to go to college some day, and applied the college discount to our purchase without my son saying much…
- AlchemistCamp 2y agoIf you continue reading the sentence, it gets even more bizarre: > it's around €650, including VAT. Whatever taxes and discounts apply to the commenter’s own idiosyncratic situation have nothing to do with the price of the product. A couple of years ago, I might have cared what the price of an M2 with Pasadena sales taxes was since I lived there at the time, but I sure wouldn’t have included them when talking about Apple prices here. Similarly, VAT costs are between you and whatever jurisdiction you live in that’s levying them. Apple isn’t the one to thank or complain to about them.
- c_ehlen 2y agoThis is most likely because OP used Euros. In Europe, prices are listed including VAT. So in day to day life, you only see prices with VAT for your country included. I would never compare prices without VAT.
- andyferris 2y agoIt might be worth noting that outside North America, we all see and think about prices post-tax. The fact tax was mentioned at all was likely for your benefit, with the knowledge there are a lot of North Americans here…
- gield 2y agoOutside of North America, it would be bizarre to not include VAT. Anytime you see the € or £ symbol, you can assume it's VAT included.
- AlchemistCamp 2y agoI am outside of North America and have been for about 3/4 of my adult life. The issue with adding VAT to prices on a forum with people living in a lot of different places is that VAT rates vary greatly from place to place. To get an idea what an Apple product costs, it's more helpful to look at the price charged prior to taxes, tax deductions, educational discounts and other factors that will depend entirely on the specific cases of each reader.
- klohto 2y ago
- vbezhenar 2y agoBecause when one configures it with reasonable 32GB RAM/2TB SSD and EU prices, it suddenly becomes £1800 and it's harder to convince anyone of its price superiority.