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
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.
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."
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.
> 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.".
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.
> 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.
I think you might be suffering from a categorical blindness to a certain type of thing humans do.
Let's say I own a private beach. I want to allow my beach to be enjoyed freely and responsibly by a reasonable number of people, whether friends or strangers. I don't want to constantly be cleaning up garbage on my beach. And I don't want the beach to be overcrowded when I myself use it.
So what do I do? Well, I'm sure not going to hire a bouncer to guard my beach. (How would I even tell them who's allowed in, anyway? Can you recognize "irresponsible people" on sight?)
No, instead, I will probably post a sign outside my beach, saying "NO TRESPASSING".
But I won't enforce it! And if anyone (e.g. my few direct friends who I invite to hang with me at my beach) asks, I'll tell them I won't enforce it! They can bring people to my beach if they like!
Access to the beach is now an open secret. It's something that people can freely tell those they trust about. The number of people visiting the beach will rise slowly over time. Maybe it'll eventually increase to be too much; or maybe it'll level off, due to churn in the population near the beach. (Mostly depends on how hard the beach is to access, and the demographics that live nearby.)
If some tour company tries to drop off a whole busload of tourists at my beach, though, I will most certainly kick them out, pointing at the "NO TRESPASSING" sign. (Since I don't have a bouncer, probably what I would actually do is call the cops on them.)
The cops would ask me about the people already on the beach, of course. To which I would say:
> Those people on the beach right now? They're my "friends." No, I don't exactly know them... but I know people who know them! They're "on the guest list." But these people standing by the bus over here — these are not my friends. These are people brought here by a guy trying to profit off of providing others access to my beach, which I have not granted. They are not allowed in. Nobody brought here by this bus company will ever be allowed in.
This is every underground party ever. This is every travel destination for the rich. Open secrets, with guardians who actively lie by exaggerating the restrictions or conditions in place, to keep a lid on the spread of the secret.
And this is a thing companies do constantly.
• Every store discount code given out to some YouTuber to give to people who watch their thing? Open secret. (Consider: is it "legitimate" for a discount app like Honey to find and publish those audience-targeted codes? No, probably not; Honey would be acting like the tour-bus operator above. But would the online store mind if you personally found the code and used it, despite not being a member of that Youtuber's audience? No, they'd be happy to have your business. Would they even mind if you told three friends, and you all immediately bought something? No. In fact, they'd be overjoyed!)
• The unmentioned (and implied to the contrary!) never-ending-ness of the free trial period for WinRAR? Open secret. (If WinRAR never implied you had to buy it at some point, nobody would have ever bought it; they'd just consider it freeware. But you don't "have" to buy it. It goes on working forever. Some people feel guilty or pressured, and do buy it. Others eventually discover the bomb is a dud. This is WinRAR's intended business model.)
• The CPU binning lottery? Open secret. (Did you know you can keep RMAing retail-purchased CPUs until you get a really highly overclockable one? You do now! And people have been doing this for decades! CPU vendors don't care—in fact, they want these few super-enthusiasts to get their hands on their best CPUs, since they'll probably publish some really nice benchmarks with them. Free advertising! They certainly don't want a company doing this in bulk though. That'd be way more trouble than it's worth; and then what would they do with a huge pile of RMAed known-below-average-binned CPUs?)
• How easy Photoshop was to pirate in the pre-Creative-Cloud era? Open secret. (See my sibling post.)
You can exploit any/all of these if you know (and you're not in a situation legally preventing you from doing so — e.g. corporations can't pirate things.)
And some people know; but most people don't.
This equilibrium state is exactly the point aimed for by the corporations that create these open secrets. They don't want these secrets known by everyone. (If enough people do it, then it's no longer a marketing expense, but a hole in their business model.) But they don't want these secrets known by nobody, either.
The creators of any open secret, want some deserving people to take advantage of the open secret; otherwise they wouldn't have made it an open secret. (In almost all cases, you have to actually do extra work to make something an open secret. It's extra work to carefully design and manage the "virality coefficient" of an open secret so that it'll hit equilibrium, rather than spreading to fixation or dying out. The outbound word-of-mouth advertising required to get an underground party to happen, for example, is way more work than just putting up posters! It would almost always have been easier to just have no secret at all!)
I hope you will agree with me that this dynamic exists in general.
If you do: what then leads you to believe that what Apple has here is a dumb unenforced mistake, rather than an open secret?
---
One extra point, that doesn't have a clean place to insert above: corporations are really careful with the way they structure the wording of the exaggerated-restriction "wards" shrouding their open secrets.
For a person, a "TRESPASSING A-OK" sign would just be a sign. But for a corporation, any positive criteria they give implying that a group does qualify for a certain promotion, can be taken as a legal promise on their part.
If Apple offered an obscure promotion to "anyone who can find it" — some secondary secret version of their online store that just happens to have lower prices, say — and then some bigcorp found it... and if Apple then attempted to refuse to apply those promotional prices to that bigcorp's 100k-seat volume purchase of Mac Studios or whatever they were trying to get away with — then the bigcorp could actually be in their right to sue Apple for breaking the promise they were making by having such a store available without qualification! (a.k.a. promissory estoppel.)
(To be clear, to win such a case, the bigcorp would have to also prove that they then went out and did something under the assumption that they could get those 100k Mac Studios at that price — bought 100k Mac Studio-shaped desk nooks, say — and that by being refused the promotion, this contingent action has resulted in a financial loss for them — e.g. if it turns out the 100k nooks have zero resale value, so they're out the cost of the nooks, and also have a huge pile of useless plastic it'll probably cost money to dispose of. But that's not too uncommon of a problem to have, in a big-enough corp with many async/concurrent/pipelined corporate purchasing negotiations going on. So it's something the legal departments of vendors like Apple are always wary of accidentally getting tangled up in.)
"Students and teachers" is a particularly nice/"safe" wording for open-secret shrouding language for a corporate promotion, because there is no case in which a corporation qualifies as a student or a teacher. And yet literally anyone else can become a student at any time, just by signing up for a zero-tuition-until-you-take-courses online university program and nabbing the resulting .edu email. (By the premise of continuous education/lifelong learning, we are always students!) "Students and teachers" is a group that any price-conscious motivated individual can join trivially (just like clipping a coupon!), but which keeps the corporate-buyer discount-loophole-hunters out.
That is a great write up. But I think this proves even more my point that people do anything to make an excuse for cheating :)
I agree that there might be some open secrets. This particular case is not comparable. Simply, because it does not make sense. Apple is making a harware business. They are already are giving the discount for the correct use base where the discount is an actual investment
* Students that then might pick the same hardware in the future at work, company they found, etc.
* Teachers, who promote the same hardware for students
For others, why this would be open secret? The correct user base already gets the discount. There are no benefits to give discount for others as well, even in secret. It is just loss. These same people likely would by the hardware anyway. I bet that this price difference does not make them to not buy the product.
The story you are telling is not comparable in this case.
The comparable comparison would include that you allow some random people into that beach well, that you don't trust. But because the count is so small, it does not matter.
However, people start posting about your beach in social media, or even in Hacker News. Friends of friends of friends tell about their friends too. Now the beach is crowded and all randoms are the all the time! What would you do? Get a bouncer or put "a real" Trespassing sign? And even your friends can't enjoy the beach anymore.
It is all about statistics and in what direction we let these things go.
> That is a great write up. But I think this proves even more my point that people do anything to make an excuse for cheating :)
You would have an argument (not a good argument) if I ever actually took advantage of the education discount. But I don't!
(I get all my Apple computers as business-lease equipment from my employer, within which I have arbitrary IT equipment purchasing authority. And then, once they've fully depreciated, I buy those computers from my employer for a trivial sum to become my personal computer(s), and also order new current-gen work computer(s). Is this "cheating?" No, Apple loves this — my employer is paying full price, and never gets any sort of discount. And my employer also loves this — they just want me to be productive, and paying a few thousand dollars to buy whatever arbitrary equipment I requisition every two years, is extremely cheap for how much my added productivity will make them over that period. Given the different things each party in this relationship values, this is a win-win-win.)
> For others, why this would be open secret? The correct user base already gets the discount. There are no benefits to give discount for others as well, even in secret.
As roughly seven other people have replied to you: price discrimination. The user base Apple would like to help out are "individual buyers who just barely cannot afford Apple products, with a $100 discount being enough of a difference to prevent them from falling out of the funnel."
Students tend to be central members of this group; but Apple, in practice, seems to actually want to help this group as a whole.
(And why wouldn't they? It's not like they're making a loss on education-discounted sales. They're making money and getting people into the Apple ecosystem, where they'll hopefully dive deeper once they have more money!)
But there's no way to openly offer "anyone who needs a $100 discount to be convinced to buy an Apple product" that $100 discount, without either:
• sounding like you're literally calling people poor (open "means-adjusted pricing"? It's been tried; people hate it! Only ever gets aired out as a TAM-expansion tactic in markets for extremely-inelastic-demand goods with zero competition, e.g. on-patent medications.)
• or leaving a loophole for rich people to find that results in Apple not being able to milk them.
And the one thing that goes against every strand of a luxury consumer product company's DNA, is the thought of letting a rich buyer with high willingness-to-pay get away with a low-margin purchase. In Apple's business, milking one rich customer can give you the net profit of dozens of low-margin customers. (Think: convincing some Mr. Moneybags who walks into an Apple Store thinking they want a Mac Mini, that what they really need is a fully-upgraded Mac Studio.)
> However, people start posting about your beach in social media, or even in Hacker News. Friends of friends of friends tell about their friends too. Now the beach is crowded and all randoms are the all the time! What would you do? Get a bouncer or put "a real" Trespassing sign? And even your friends can't enjoy the beach anymore.
How is this comparable? As other sibling replies state, the open secret of the Apple education discount has been widely dispersed for at least a decade now. It is at equilibrium — it clearly isn't spreading to the point that "the beach is overcrowded." Ask a random person off the street — heck, ask the average person on HN five minutes before this thread started — and they would not know that Apple offers an education discount but doesn't verify academic status.
You want to know what an open secret reaching fixation looks like? Picture it being discussed in "money-saving tips" listicle videos put out by popular [i.e. tens-of-millions-of-subs] vloggers. Not even tech vloggers, either — I'm talking gaming vloggers, art vloggers, beauty vloggers, etc.
Some open secrets do run away like this — and yes, this does cause their creators to pull the plug! The Apple Store education-discount open secret is not like this.
> This equilibrium state is exactly the point aimed for by the corporations that create these open secrets.
Not necessarily. You know that biological evolution is blind, but thriving in a market environment doesn't require companies to know why what they are doing is successful.
So eg Photoshop (and Windows) used to be really easy to 'pirate' by individuals. And you can argue that this was good for Adobe (and Microsoft), because it's like an informal education discount: youngsters get used to the software at home and train themselves, so that later on it becomes the obvious choice for the office.
But for the mechanism to work, Adobe doesn't have to understand the mechanism. They could just not know at all about the pirating, or conclude that it's too much hassle to chase the pirates (but be completely unaware of the positive effects). Or on the contrary, they could over-estimate the positive effects of piracy etc.
Microsoft products are trivial to pirate thanks to Microsoft Activation Scripts [1] which is on GitHub. It is inconceivable that they aren't aware of it with 102k stars. That can only be deliberate.
I agree: I am sure that people at Microsoft are aware these days.
The first commit in the Microsoft Activation Scripts repository is from 2020. For Microsoft the dynamic I describe goes back all the way to the 1980s (and perhaps even earlier.)
Back in the 1970s and 1980s people at Microsoft might or might not have been aware. (I don't know for sure either way.) But it already worked in their favour.
My point is that the dynamic works whether or not anyone is aware of it.
Having a cloud account is entirely disconnected from the activation state of Windows, and always will be. The activation state of Windows is a property of a Windows installation, because Windows installations — all the ones Microsoft cares about, at least — are managed (including license management!) by the IT departments of organizations; while Windows logins are managed by individual users.
Microsoft would be breaking their own business model in half if they forced each user to have a "Windows subscription" bound to their personal cloud account, instead of being able to just sign a $10MM/yr contract with Oracle or EY or whomever for a 100K-seat volume license.
Remember also that many large-scale deployments of Windows machines aren't of personal computers at all, but of:
1. workstations with non-cloud Active Directory-managed user accounts, with the accounts and data on the machine being backed up to corporate servers and thus the machine itself able to be drop-in replaced overnight without the user even noticing the change;
2. workstations with roaming user profiles configured, where many different people log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (think: computer labs, internet cafes, etc)
3. shared workstations where many employees log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (may overlap with 1) — think of the computers behind the desks at the customer-service wickets at a bank
4. machines with no logged-in users, only an AD administrator remote-managing them through domain privileges — think e.g. digital signage
If licensing status attaches to the logged-in user, then none of these use-cases work! And together, these use-cases form 80+% of how Microsoft makes money from Windows!
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!)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Since the first ARM systems (may be before) you can’t upgrade things on your own, i had an Air which can be SSD upgraded but not memory upgraded. Memory can only be upgraded from factory.
One thing that will potentially future-proof the new Mac Mini is that the SSD is on a removable board. It's a custom Apple design but someone's already hand made their own upgrade. Wouldn't be surprised if there will be 3rd party upgrades commercially available within a year.
> € 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)
But what's the point in Borcher's comment? Because there's efficient software use of memory, it's legitimate to put a tenfold price marker on the hardware?
Yeah, that doesn't explain why the Intel Mac Pro cheesegrater wanted $3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM that OWC would sell from the same manufacturer, same speeds, for $1,000 for 192GB.
Sorry Bob, architecture may be different now, but Apple has always been egregious.
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).
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.)
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