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all 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

all 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 ago
I’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 ago
Regardless, 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 ago
  I'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 ago
  They 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 ago
      It'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.
      - nicce 2y ago
        > It's not cheating if they intend for you to do it It feels like you are proving my point of people finding excuses to buy the Mac with educational discount, when they don't meet the requirements :) The intend it clearly for educational setting. For students and teachers. You dishonor the intend if you still try to claim the discount. Whether you are punished or not.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  It'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 ago
    But 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 ago
      Likewise, 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 ago
        It 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 ago
  SheerID 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 ago
  Pretty 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 ago
  20 years ago I worked Apple retail and this was well known then.
- linhns 2y ago
  Tbh, it's not that much compared to Apple sales.
- Foobar8568 2y ago
  In Switzerland (Europe?) we can easily get cheaper price, from official resellers, than the edu price. Apple store won't match.
mcv 2y ago
Does 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 ago
  They 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 ago
    AFAIK, in most of the EU they validate you are a student or an academic through UNiDAYS.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    We 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 ago
      Some 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  They 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.

devmor 2y ago

I’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 ago

Regardless, 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 ago
I'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 ago
They 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 ago
    It'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.
    - nicce 2y ago
      > It's not cheating if they intend for you to do it It feels like you are proving my point of people finding excuses to buy the Mac with educational discount, when they don't meet the requirements :) The intend it clearly for educational setting. For students and teachers. You dishonor the intend if you still try to claim the discount. Whether you are punished or not.
tshaddox 2y ago
It'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 ago
  But 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 ago
    Likewise, 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 ago
      It 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 ago
SheerID 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 ago
Pretty 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 ago
20 years ago I worked Apple retail and this was well known then.
linhns 2y ago
Tbh, it's not that much compared to Apple sales.
Foobar8568 2y ago
In Switzerland (Europe?) we can easily get cheaper price, from official resellers, than the edu price. Apple store won't match.

mcv 2y ago

Does 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 ago
They 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 ago
  AFAIK, in most of the EU they validate you are a student or an academic through UNiDAYS.
- OJFord 2y ago
  We 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 ago
    Some 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 ago

You 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 ago
I 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 ago
They 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.