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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Amazon Quietly Yanks Discount for Mac OS X 10.2 102

WCityMike writes "Amazon has quietly revoked the $50 rebate for Mac OS X 10.2 it was supposedly offering through September 3. The rebate form was updated to reflect this a few hours later. While theories as to why abound (including supposed involvement from Apple), some have reasonably pointed out that Amazon may not have expected as voluminous a response as they got, making the rebate a potentially major cash loss had it continued at that volume. People who already placed their orders should probably contact Amazon, while the rest of us can simply continue hoping Apple will offer its own 'rebate'." I think maybe it was a mistake; the rebate form I saw originally never had Mac OS X 10.2 on it.
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Amazon Quietly Yanks Discount for Mac OS X 10.2

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  • Hopefully they will at least honor the people who already pre-ordered OS X 10.2.

    It's okay if it was a mistake and they were forced to take it down.

    Now it's time for everybody to make friends with a college student to get the Apple-Student-$50 discount.

    • they said they will honor orders that were already completed.... too bad mine was/is sitting in my cart. i figured there was no hurry to pre-order and was trying to figure out what DVDs i should buy. i figured i easily went over the free shipping price, so i might as well buy a few books and DVDs that are not always in local stores. oops.
      from how they are acting and that one copy of the wonky rebate form i wonder if it was an error. i can see a huge discount coming on remaining copies of 10.1.3, but who the hell would want to buy it? it's not like 9.2 where some machines won't run OS X. if your machine runs OS X then i can't see why it won't run 10.2 even better (faster too).
      Amazon has acknowledged errors in the past too. they honor the completed orders, but from then on scrap the deal.
  • Hint Apple... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you want greater adoption CHARGE LESS! This should also be patently obvious to Microsoft andf their office X suite. I know it's a good deal 150 improvements. BUT if apple is really serious about greater influence they will bite the bullet and charge less then they originally proposed. Jaguar by itself will convince wintel users to switch. Hell, I'd be giving this away on the condition that you show it off to three of your friends.
    • then how would you make money??? os-x costs a lot less than wintendows does.. and you get a few other nifty features like the OSs of olde. stability.. configurability... security.. these are all more important to me than saving a few notes. if you want to start supporting your vendor, that's great, support them by buying their product. don't whinge because they're cheaper, but not by enough for you. or change to linux if you think everybody should give you free software.
      • Umm...Apple has always made most of their money on hardware. They could practically give this OS away and still make money if we all show our windows friends how cool it is. I'm particularly bothered by the price of Jaguar because I just bought a brand-new machine 6 weeks before MacWorld and I have to pay full price for 10.2. I'm not upset that they came out with a newer machine with a bigger screen than mine or that they lowered the price on mine, but I've been a paying customer for Mac OS X since the beta. Besides, most of Jaguar is bug fixes anyway. Sure there are some new features, but how many of us have or will use a writing tablet. Don't get me wrong, I want it. But it's not worth another $130 on top of the $1999 I just spent on the machine. If I was a windows convert and just buying a Mac for the first time, I really be disappointed.
    • Selling OS X retail is purely for existing apple users. Anyone new won't care that their freinds version has 150 more features, they will get it for the look and feel which is the same as in 10.1.3. All charging less will do is allow a few more 10.1.x users to upgrade.

      That being said I think it would be a fairly good idea for them to offer all versions of the OS for free. I can see it being a HUGE selling point when you tell someone that if you buy this computer you will always get the latest OS on it. Sure they will lose all their OS X sales revenues but they will sell more hardware which is the bulk of their revenue and will get great PR. Can you imagine how happy most windows users would be if their computer always had the latest and greate... nevermind :) version of windows on it? excluding the whole palladium... and DRM... and EULA's... and okay bad example:) Still i do believe that giving away the OS for free would be very good for apple.

  • the rebate was there (Score:5, Informative)

    by kelly_hirano ( 145138 ) on Thursday August 01, 2002 @06:23PM (#3995561)
    the rebate was there, but according to macminute [macminute.com] :

    "Customer response exceeded our wildest expectations so we're not continuing the rebate at this time," Ling Hong, an Amazon.com spokesperson told MacMinute. "But obviously all the pre-orders that we received during the time that the rebate offer was posted on our site will be honored." Hong said all orders placed up until 19:00 PT yesterday will be eligible.

    • Basically what that quote means is 'we thought we'd try a stupid publicity stunt to get more people to come to our website and look around, but then we decided that maybe we shouldn't lose our shirts'.

      Rule number one of marketing: let the suppliers do the rebates, unless you have a ton of stock that you NEED to get rid of, but don't want to just mark down. The only reason to ever sell for less than you buy at is amortization, depreciation, or cutting your losses. Selling pre-orders at less than cost is the mentality behind most dot-com businesses - bleed red ink, but make up for it in added services.

      Dumb dumb.

      --Dan
  • not only that, but they took away my gold box!
    i loved the excitement of checking that gold box once a day. (sure i never bought anything from it, but still...)

    anyone know any hacks to get the gold box back?
    • Re:gold box anyone? (Score:2, Informative)

      by crow ( 16139 )
      Mine randomly goes away at times and then comes back. No big deal. Sometimes they don't have extra-special offers for you. Half the time when they do, at least one is sold out by the time you get to it. I doubt they discontinued the program--it's a great way to unload the last few units of discontinued items.
      • And yet, Amazon feels this need to offer me a deal on a "Hello Kitty board game." I don't know HOW they came up with the idea that I might have ANY desire to buy such a thing, since I pretty much ONLY buy computer books from them. Great system they have there. heh.

        -Alex
    • meh... every gold box offer I ever got was for hardware... I don't need no stinking hardware!
      • i'm assuming that you mean hammers and tools and stuff. i kept getting this $130 rice cooker, it was pretty funny b/c they are like $35 in almost any store. i got the occaisional mp3 player, i almost bought 2 of them. the guy who works across from me has been getting good DVD's for cheap (memento - $10). lucky bastard. i think its because he has some AMZN stock or something.
        • meh... I have AMZN stock too... I want DVD and MP3 player offers! I'm tired of $2000 circular saws and $250 screwdrivers that I don't want, can't afford, and don't need.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    check it out.....maybe other sites have this as well?
  • by Anonymous Coward
    This pretty much shows two things:

    a) Everybody wants Jaguar
    b) Nobody wants to pay Apple's criminally high price

    Apple should stop being buttheads. They really are pushing it lately. I only use Macs because Apple's not scummy like Microsoft. That was before. Now they're even MORE scummy than Microsoft. I'm almost hoping the DoJ takes a crack at Apple. What a bunch of crooks.

    And I'm not trolling, I've just been constantly pissed off at Apple for about a month. They suck and I hate that I love them so much.

    Zoober

    • then change to linux you cheap wanker.

      OS-X is cheaper than windows. pull your head out of your arse.

      i'm sick of losers who insist on everything being free. once you fuckwads come out of school and realise there's a real world, you might be shocked.


    • How is charging about half what microsoft charges for an update, and giving you a free one for every one you have to buy (apple only charges every other update) "criminal"? And worse than microsoft?

      Hey, we remember getting system 4 and 5 and 6 for free, but Apple has a different business model now.

      Think of it this way-- you're really paying for the iApps but getting the OS for free.

      Ok?

      I really don't see how buying an os upgrade every other year is such a big deal. And it costs %60 of what you'd be paying to microsoft (Really even less when you factor in all the hassle and add-on packs MS sells.)

      • Most of the noise over the Jaguar upgrade price seems to be folks who have just paid for the full version with a new system. Most of us don't mind paying something, but $199 (Canadian dollars, no education discount, AFAICT [email if you know different]) is too much just 4 months after buying a full copy of 10.1.

        Yes, I consider the $6K I spent on a new G4 package, and the OS X license it came with a "full purchase" of OS X 10.1.x. How is it not?

        Sorry, but that is just how I feel. I would gladly pay something, but not full price. It's all in the presentation, isn't it?

        Then again, if the "full price" was $299, and apple offered it $199, maybe it wouldn't sting so bad.

        The point is that it might make more business sense to offer some kind of tiered pricing, especially given the "switch" compaign. I love my new Mac. Apple should be trying to encourage that warm and fuzzy feeling us UNIX geeks get with OS X.

        Maybe the price is fair, and we are all being unreasonable. This doesn't change the fact that Apple could have presented the price in a better light to ease the sticker shock. Somebody fsck'd up.

        In the end, only the totally honest will be the ones to pay full price. A good number of otherwise honest folk will find other ways to create their own discount. In this case, they will harangue Amazon. Others will find more creative ways. It doesn't have to be this way.

      • I guess the difference is, with MS I'm still holding on to W2k because XP frightens me, but with Apple I actually want Jaguar. ;)

        • I've been running it a couple days and Jaguar is quite a delight.

          I don't think people realize how much has changed- the new finder looks the same, but from the pointer and beachball replacements, to every button in the UI, Aqua is different... generally its quite a wonderful OS.

  • I think maybe it was a mistake; the rebate form I saw originally never had Mac OS X 10.2 on it.

    Hey puge! Look again. I have a backup of the rebateform here [mac.com].
  • by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @01:41AM (#3997253)
    and somewhat shot itself in the foot by continuously spoiling the Mac faithful for years. Mac users have gotten great free products (iTunes, iTools, etc.) that can be and are flaunted in the faces of Windows users. But after so much of this, Apple has created a situation where many of the diehard Mac users no longer realize that Apple is a company that is trying to make a profit, just like other companies out there such as *gasp* Microsoft. That means that when they release new products, especially quality ones such as Jaguar, they will most likely charge for them. If they offer something sweet for free like iPhoto, the Mac community should be happy but not unfairly raise expectations for more free products. If it really bothers people to be paying for a point release (which as many have pointed out would be a whole new OS by Redmond's standards), think of it as buying a suite of new applications and features: iChat, Sherlock 3, Quartz Extreme, etc.


    • Mod the parent up, not down. nobody has expressed this quite this way before, and its insightful.
    • iChat is an Apple GUI on AOL Instant Messenger...Can't be worth more than $10 - $20 bucks
      Sherlock 3 is Apple's absorption of the most excellent Watson...$30(includes lifetime updates)
      Quartz Extreme...I'd hardly call this an application from the user standpoint. This is Apple making up for opting for stability over performance in the pre-10.2 releases. This is a bug fix; I'm very happy for it, but it's still a bug fix.

      It's completely appropriate to charge 130 bucks for this for anyone that didn't pay for the 10.1 release. I just spent $1999 on a new iMac 7 weeks ago. I called Apple to ask them what good my Software Coupons are and they told me they are there to remind me to upgrade now and then. Now I fondly remember when those coupons were there to get you the next release of the OS. So now, just two months after dropping a bundle, I have to shell out $130 just to keep up. There should be a reasonable upgrade price for owners of 10.1.
  • I don't think so. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Last I heard under the Consumer Protection Acts of virtually all states there was no means of "pulling an announced rebate."

    Amazon's own terms of agreement indicate a rebate is valid as long as it's posted.

    Check the link provided. It's still "posted."

    They still running the same scam for a number of other products. The coupon still reads the same.

    How are they going to "pull the rebate."

    They aren't if anyone's in the mood to try them. I am. I ordered another box of Jaguar the day after the rebate "was pulled."

    Amazon should know better having had there tit in similar ringers in the past (if you'll pardon the expression). :)

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02, 2002 @02:53AM (#3997386)
    Sign up for the Apple Developer Connection mailing. You'll get OS 10.2 plus a year's worth of developer tools, SDKs, and updates.
    • Or sign up for the Select ADC membership. It costs you $500, but you can also get software seeds (if you sign the NDA). And, after the first year, you get a hardware discount that typically pays for the membership (assuming you use it). Oh, and you get 5 OS licenses as long as you're use them for developing, testing, etc. There are some other benefits, too, (that I've never used). http://developer.apple.com/membership/select.html
    • Ummm... what's this $70 thing? The Developer Tools, SDK's, etc never cost me anything. I just signed up for the free Developer Connection. I didn't get OS 10 for it though. A link would be handy/helpful.

      But I don't know why I'd pay $70 more if there was no reason to.

      -Alex
  • well, im making the switch sometime this month. im gonna pick up a stacked out powerbook, and am looking forward to finally having an operating system that i really like.

    but the specs page for the powerbook says it is shipping with OS 10.1. will i have to pay the full $120 for the upgrade to 10.2?
    • Anyone who buys a Mac that ships with 10.1 before October 31 can get Jaguar for $19.95.

      http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
    • No, as long as you purchase 10.2 before October 31, it will only cost you $19.95. Look at their page describing the Mac OS X Up-To-Date program [apple.com]. If you are willing to delay your purchase by perhaps one to two months (i.e. September or October), they will probably begin shipping it with 10.2 preloaded.
      • thanks for the response, guys. thats all i needed to know. :)

        im getting the powerbook at a big discount through a friend who works for apple. he is coming back to school at the end of this month, so i wont be waiting any longer than that.

        you guys are most helpful.
    • Just wait. It should be shipping with 10.2 in a couple weeks. Unless you REALLY want your toy, I'd wait. You will still have to wait for "assembly" and shipping anyway.

      -Alex
  • by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:34AM (#3999465) Homepage
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail /-/software/B00006F7S2/rebates/02/002-1732681-4549 637

    As of five minutes ago...

    This link DOES show a rebate coupon, the coupon DOES list "Mac OS X 10.2: Jaguar," and the coupon DOES say it is good for purchases made between 7/29/02 and 09/03/02.

  • The rebate form is still available from Amazon (see another product listed in the rebate form such as PartitionMagic [amazon.com]) listing Jaguar. Unless they post or otherwise make it known to those who have ordered/who are ordering, that the rebate is no longer valid (which according to the Mac OS X 10.2 [amazon.com] page hasn't happened), they need to honor it. Otherwise how is it different than bait-and-switch?

    I ordered it from them pre 1900PDT on 7/31, so according to the article it'll still be honored. If it's not though, I will dispute the charge through my credit card company since it's clearly a rebate for which I qualify, and I have the document to prove it.

    I don't know the legalities involved, but I assume that they're ok if they announce the rebate no longer applies before the product is charged.

  • YES, the "School of Changes" rebate form still exists on Amazon.

    NO, the rebate form no longer has "Mac OS 10.2: Jaguar" listed on it.
  • Has anyone contacted Amazon about this? What sort of reply have you gotten from them?

    If I can't get the $50 rebate, I'll cancel my order.
  • I printed out a rebate coupon with OS X 10.2: Jaguar. This is no longer any good? Maybe I should put this coupon on the web for everyone to use. We should flood their store with them. Your Brother Dale.
  • don't hold your breath. As I said in the petition [petitiononline.com], the public's upgrade price should be about $69, and the student's should be about $39.

    What Apple (and its customers) need to keep in mind is that unlike Windows, with its myriad versions of the OS, each supposedly targeted for a different market (Home, Professional, etc.), Apple really only has one. Well, unless you're running a professional-grade server, in which case you get OS X Server with it, don't you?

  • As the subject says..I'll quote the email I recieved from Amazon.
    Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com regarding this issue.


    We recently offered a $50.00 promotional rebate for "Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar." This item is currently available for pre-order on our web site. Due to the overwhelming response to this promotional offer, we are unable to continue offering the rebate at this time.

    We will be honoring rebate offers for pre-orders of this product that were placed on or before 7:00 pm PDT July 31, 2002.

    At this time, we are unable to honor this rebate offer for pre-orders that were placed after 7:00 pm PDT July 31, 2002. We apologize for any inconvenience.

    Since your pre-order was placed during the time period that this promotional offer was posted on our web site, please proceed with submitting this rebate offer per the instructions located on the
    rebate form. Please note, these offers will be limited to one per household. If you were unable to print this rebate form at the time of purchase, please contact us; we will send you the necessary link to print this promotional offer.

    Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.
  • Why does slashdot waste everyones time

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