Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Education, Apple Financial, Bad Apple, Apple TV
Educational discounts fading away?
As Apple transitions to more consumer devices, it's only logical certain items won't be discounted for educational use, right? Reader Adam pointed out the Apple TV isn't discounted on the edu store. He goes on to ponder the iPhone, which I think we're all pretty certain will never be edu-discounted, but here's hoping... Then again, doesn't the Apple TV make sense for educational use? Many moons ago I worked in a master control room at a local college. We went through extraordinary lengths to pipe video into classrooms. At $299 a pop, it would seem that the Apple TV might be effective for distributing content into classrooms again. It'd be a lot nicer at something like $279 or even $249, as schools aren't exactly known for being flush with cash... But what do you think? Does Apple's dropping the "Computer" from their name mean they'll start dropping educational discounts too?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Arthur Dickerson said 4:06PM on 1-11-2007
How do Sony, or Toshiba edu-price their items - they both have considerable consumer electronics divisions.
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Leonard Nimrod said 4:28PM on 1-11-2007
Just because Apple isn't offering EDU discounts to students, doesn't mean they aren't giving discounts to school systems through other channels.
If a 100 school district wants 10 per school then I'm sure they will be receiving a sizable discount from Apple for the 1000 iTVs.
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Quix said 4:34PM on 1-11-2007
With profit margins gradually shrinking for Apple in order to stay competitive with the rest of the market in general (even with their premium price points), I'm not surprised to see them cutting back on edu discounts. When I was in college, the student price on a Mac (we're talking Mac Classic days) was a screaming deal compared to the normal retail price. Like 50% off, or more. But Apple's markup in those days was huge compared to today (as I understand things). Now you save what, $50 on a MacBook? Whoop de doo. That's less than a 5% discount. A student is better off ordering from Amazon to get a rebate and save the sales tax. Just like the rest of us.
Maybe they can compensate for the slim edu discounts on hardware by increasing their software discounts. That would be a smart move.
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dms said 4:44PM on 1-11-2007
My opinion: EDU discounts will stay on computers. You need a computer to get through school today. Apple TV's, iPods, not so much. In fact, I was surprised when the iPod was introduced and had a discount.
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Brakki said 4:45PM on 1-11-2007
How about the military discounts though >_>
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Paul said 4:45PM on 1-11-2007
OH LAWDY! I HOPE NOT! We need educational discounts!
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Dan Bruno said 4:46PM on 1-11-2007
Apple's educational discounts have always been more substantial for software than for hardware. Intuitively, this makes sense -- once you've written a program, the additional cost of producing additional copies of it is pretty trivial compared to the cost of additional machines. The academic editions of Logic, for example, are each half the cost of their "normal" counterparts.
I'd guess the trend will continue, with small (or no) discounts for hardware and bigger ones for software.
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Mike Utugau said 4:51PM on 1-11-2007
that's fair as iPhone and AppleTV are not exactly educational products...
in fact some people will disagree, but in theory, anything can be labeled as educational, even an atomic bomb, if you realize one can use it for educational purposes...
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Evan Hindra said 5:07PM on 1-11-2007
they'll have sacrifice a lot of sales then. Educational Instituton makes up a lot for it.
I'm in a design school, most of our computers in the labs are Macs. One of the director spoke to me, and said that if it weren't because of the price apple offer to them, they would've gone with PCs (and would sitll be cheaper if they'd gone with the PCs).
Same thing with students, a lot of the first year students I met this year, are new switchers!
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Travis said 5:14PM on 1-11-2007
Apparently they dropped the educational discount for iPods and iPod related accessories a while ago. I tried to get a discount on new headphones a while back (cat ate my old ones) and was told that they don't offer edu discounts because they're priced "low enough that it doesn't matter."
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Jonathan said 5:20PM on 1-11-2007
From what I've seen in the past, Apple does not provide discounts for newly released products, but will support a discount in the future.
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Brian Ashe said 5:21PM on 1-11-2007
Hurry up and graduate and get a job with a big faceless corporation! I can get an appleTV through my company for $275.
I won't, though, 'cause I've already got a Mac Mini in my living room. But I could. :-)
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Barkin said 5:31PM on 1-11-2007
Jonathan (and everyone else) -
1. Apple does indeed discount newly released stuff. There's a $20 discount on the new Airport Extreme Base Station for students.
2. The ed discounts aren't going anywhere. It costs Apple very little to knock $50 or $20 off of a few products, but it goes a long way toward engendering good will with students and schools, who tend to be some of Apple's most reliable customers. Fifty bucks may not be a lot to Apple, but its a lot to a poor college student. $50 buys a lot of beer.
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Jason said 6:22PM on 1-11-2007
It's worth noting the education discount is available for the new Airport Extreme v2. $159 instead of $179.
I've just found they're not carrying it on specific items, like iTV and some iPods. However, as long as it's available for the desktops and laptops, I wouldn't complain too loudly.
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Amy said 6:45PM on 1-11-2007
I am a teacher (middle school) and several of our faculty use iPods for various reasons. I use one in my English class when discussing lyrics as poetry. Many universities are now offering podcasted classes (yes, parents, you are paying $26,000+ a year so your son/daughter can sit on the couch, swill beer, and not actually have to go to a class.) The educational discount is important to us folks in the EDU world, I just wish it were actually a bit of a better deal.
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Gary said 6:47PM on 1-11-2007
Ed discounts are no big thing. Like Quix stated, go elsewhere and still get the same price as an Ed discount, but you might get it without shipping fees. For students, if you are careful where you order it, no sales tax. As a former teacher, I could get the Ed discount, but found it cheaper to order online. Same price as the discount, but no shipping fees and no sales tax.
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Finch said 6:54PM on 1-11-2007
I totally aggree, if it weren't for the student discount i'd never have been able to afford my macpro, in my course we do alot of video editing and rendering on this thing is FAST, so convinient when we lazy students leave projects to the last min! I hope they don't drop the discount on certain products. iPod's come in very handy as a portable hard drive for large files also, so i'd argue they should keep the discount on them too.
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Kym said 7:02PM on 1-11-2007
Seeing as they introduced the new airport base station the same day, but quietly, and it has the discount taken off of the price, I don't think that the discounts are going away any time soon. The Apple TV isn't really a necessity though, no matter how many wonderful applications of the device you can conceive of. But, maybe the price will go down once it is no longer on pre-order, or once prices drop in general?
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Kelly Dumont said 7:56PM on 1-11-2007
I think we are missing a point here. What are schools going to connect the AppleTV to? Their brand new 42 in. LCD or Plasma displays. In a few select schools maybe. Other wise they better hope they have some newer projectors that will work with it, because their old TV's won't
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Si said 10:04PM on 1-11-2007
I'm fairly certain that Apple won't drop edu discounts on the computers (and associated 'essentials' such as iWork, printers etc), as there is such a huge market out there; every year in the UK hundreds of thousands of people (like myself) started out at university, the large majority of whom will buy or have bought a computer especially for the occasion. To such cash-strapped individuals, who will be poor and/or in debt for many years to come, the word "discount" is merely replaced with "EXTRA ££/$$ HERE", and the number of students I know who have bought Apple products purely because of the edu discount is astonishing.
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