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The Almighty Buck Education Apple

Apple Now Verifies Anyone Asking for Educational Discounts (theverge.com) 43

Posted by msmash from the loophole-closed dept.
Apple has introduced a new verification process in the US to ensure that customers who want to benefit from its discounted education pricing are actually involved in education. From a report: It's not clear exactly when its policy changed, but at some point this month, some Reddit users noticed that Apple's education pricing page was updated to note that customers will now be checked by Unidays, a third-party verification service. As well as requiring Unidays, Apple is also placing new limits on how many items you can buy with an educational discount. Apple Track reports that users are limited to one desktop computer, one Mac mini, one laptop, two iPads, and two accessories per year. Given that's more than any student, teacher, or educational staff member is likely to purchase for themselves in a given year, the limit seems to be in place to stop them from acting as an illicit discount broker for all their non-education friends.
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Apple Now Verifies Anyone Asking for Educational Discounts More

Apple Now Verifies Anyone Asking for Educational Discounts

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  • The purchasing limits aren't new (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday January 21, 2022 @12:32PM (#62195067)

    Years ago, back when our university's bookstore still had a tech department, the "Apple Education" price sheet they distributed included a statement which matched up with the purchasing limitations mentioned in TFS.

    • Re:The purchasing limits aren't new (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fermion ( 181285 ) on Friday January 21, 2022 @03:09PM (#62195539) Homepage Journal
      This does not seem new, just modernized. I have been using the educational discount for most of my life. At the stores I have been asked for ID from my institution, asked to login in my institution, etc. online I just assumed since I have previously qualified for educational discount, they were no longer checking me. I have asked for educational discount for other vendors, like MS, and I had to send the a copy of ID to verify.

      For those of us who have been around, what they will eventually need is a senior discount.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        a veterans discount would have been nice. Its easy to verify as ID.me is already setup for all of us veterans so we dont have to send a DD214 to every site giving a discount.
      • Was just going to reply to say that the checks in general are pretty lax, I'm affiliated with a .edu so have legitimate access to discounts and I'm sometimes surprised at how little checking is done for educational discounts and it's often just "has a .edu email address" or "pinky swears they're at school".
  • The title reads "Apple Now Verifies Anyone Asking for Educational Discounts". My native-English speaking intuition tells me the word "Everyone" should be used in this context. Am I right?

    It seems like a close call though. The choice of anyone vs everyone is usually decided over whether the referent is a subset or full group. In the title, "anyone" could refer to only the people asking for a discount, meaning its usage is correct. However, "anyone" could also refer to the full group of people who have aske

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      At least you get to wear the dapper looking black uniform!

    • Re:Grammar questoin - anyone vs everyone (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday January 21, 2022 @02:01PM (#62195323) Homepage Journal

      > "Everyone" should be used in this context. Am I right?

      Both are acceptable but 'anyone' focuses on the individual and 'everyone' focuses on the mass, so editorially 'anyone' is used to minimize perceived impact.

      It's context and shades of meaning. "Does anyone want to go to the mall?" is interrogative so the context makes it different than "Does everyone want to go to the mall?".

      Anyway these Apple rules are the same as they had in the early 90's. I didn't even know they had become lax. But one of my kids is in college and everybody there is sick of Apple's poor QA and planning to not buy a Macbook Air for their next device. A mix of Chromebook, Ubuntu, and Windows is their direction.

      What'll really bake your noodle is I could have also said, "everyone there".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      The title reads "Apple Now Verifies Anyone Asking for Educational Discounts". My native-English speaking intuition tells me the word "Everyone" should be used in this context. Am I right?

      It still would be poor English. Something like "Apple Now Verifies All Claims for Educational Discounts" would be clearer.

      But this is /. where calls for clear communication are routinely mocked.

  • Buy them used. There is no reason why a student would need the latest and greatest equipment. Second hand computers more than fill the need at a much lower price point.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Would you really want to buy an older Intel powered Mac at this point, though, knowing that Apple is probably going to cut off support for it 2 or 3 years from now in favor of their own processors?

      I had the misfortune of owning a G4 Mac Mini back in the day, and it didn't take long for it to become a doorstop after Apple and their partners cut off support for that platform.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KF7IOR ( 8945637 )
      I'm wary of recommending buying a used Apple. Apple computers have fixed support periods before they drop OS updates for them. So a used purchase removes usable system longevity unless one applies one of the workarounds (that may or may not working going forward) to convince it that it's not too old to get an OS update. Also, I find used Macs don't drop that much in value. Plus, in the past decade, most laptops (Apple especially) have gotten smaller and longer lasting on battery rather than more powerfu

      • I'm wary of recommending buying a used Apple. Apple computers have fixed support periods before they drop OS updates for them.

        The "late 2015" iMac that I type this on is running MacOS 12.1 Monterey. So how long do you think they should provide updates?

        But this is all missing the point. Students can get educational discounts without problems. Teachers can. The only ones who can't are people who falsely claim to be in education. No education discount just because you say so, but only if you prove it.

      • Id caution against mac devices at all, unless you want to be treated like a red-headed step child of computing. It has all the corporate backing linux wishes it had, yet none of the innovation linux has. It doesn't have software support like windows, but at least its not barely supported like linux.
  • I remember some years ago there was a comment about Apple not enforcing this as they understood the "lifelong learner" may not always be enrolled in a class. I guess those days are over. But its worth reminding that many corporations have "buying portals" with similar discounts. Where I work, I can log into a URL and verify my work email, then get discounts with Apple, Dell, IBM, etc. The Apple discounts are the same percentage as the student discount with the same limit on quantities (both per purchase and

    • as they understood the "lifelong learner" may not always be enrolled in a class.

      You don't need to be enrolled in a class for an educational discount. But if you are not currently a student or teacher at an educational institution are you in fact getting an qualified education and if not why would you qualify for an educational discount? Note the word educational. There's no requirement to be a student in class, just that you're actively involved in an educational institution.

      Last I saw the Kahn academy nor Youtube influencers were handing out degrees.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • No it's based on Mach/BSD as I recall.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Shag ( 3737 )

        Yeah, a Mach kernel with a BSD compatibility layer or some such; definitely not Linux. Maybe you were thinking of the Windows Subsystem for Linux?

        MacOS is UNIX 03 certified (which I believe includes being certified POSIX compliant) by the Open Group. LInux and other free OSes may be POSIX compliant, as mmell suggests, but the costs of POSIX certification are steep, so they're unlikely to be certified.

        And although I presume the GNU command-line utilities are the same as on Linux, when it comes to compilers

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by _merlin ( 160982 )

          Linux isn't POSIX compliant in some significant ways. For example pwrite on a file opened with O_APPEND behaves incorrectly (see the bugs section of the relevant man page [die.net]), and there are several issues with pthread. The Linux policy seems to be to ignore POSIX compliance when it's difficult.

    • Apple - they went over to the Linux kernel some time ago, I think?

      They didn't. I think Linux isn't quite POSIX compliant, but I'd love to hear if I'm wrong.

      And you can download all the professional tools for free if you want your software to run on Macs and iOS devices. Xcode, with C, C++, Objective-C, Swift, and a dozen languages that I never tried.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      Apple - they went over to the Linux kernel some time ago, I think?

      No. That would have involved paying something back. You don't get to be the richest company in the world by paying people for their work, even in an abstract way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      You might be confused with MkLinux - which was something Apple started in the late 90s to get Linux on PowerPC. It basically was Linux on Mach, sort of like how XNU is BSD on Mach for OS X.

      This was before Apple PowerPC Macs ran OpenFirmware - after the move to OpenFirmware, Apple stopped MkLinux and bootstrapped LinuxPPC.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        PowerPC Macs always ran Open Firmware. It was when the Mac Toolbox was still in ROM though - "new world" PowerMacs loaded the Mac Toolbox from disk.

  • Traditionally this wasn't an issue since you had to buy at a store affiliated with an educational institution to get the discount, but since the late 90s when Apple started selling machines directly to buyers, first online, and then through stores, it's been abused. Though the discounts aren't nearly as substantial as they once were either.

    I wonder if this video [tiktok.com], which is rather egregious, had anything to do with it?

  • I found identical models of Mac Mini are cheaper at Currys in the UK (without any discount) than on Apple’s website with an alleged discount. I suspect the same is true in the US, where retailers are commonly invited to undercut manufacturers own websites to give retail some kind of relevance.

  • Set 1: people who qualify for the educational prices, due to being in school or working for schools
    Set 2: people who can afford those shiny new toys, even at educational prices

  • If there is a piece of software that only runs on the Mac platform, okay. You have lots of money and don't know how to burn it, okay. You want to look cool at the local starbucks...nevermind. In terms of taking notes, a notepad ought to be fine. Windows is too unstable or virus ridden to be used as a reliable tool. Okay. But Linux could be a cost-effective option. You can now run pro-grade audio/video and graphics applications on Linux, not just the GPL ones. Though some of the GPL stuff will give the propr
    • You know there ar a lot of very good software Devs who use Macs. Decent hardware, with access to OpenSource software and commercial software is a pleasing package is extremely compelling for some people.
      I freely admit you can get better specs for less money, but very few cheap PCs will still be useable 5 years on and the Mac probably will be.
      If you compare a professional grade laptop to a similar spec PC Laptop the prices are not as far apart as you might think.

      I run Linux on all my home machines, and
      • I really should learn to proofread my own posts. It should say.

        If you compare a professional grade PC laptop to a similar spec Apple laptop the prices are not as far apart as you might think.
      • Right, I never saw an IT pro use Thinkpads or flagship models of any other manufacturer. Only Macs. Dualbooting is not a thing. Thinkpads or any other manufacturer machine dissolve into composite materials in less than five years. With PC (and Linux) it is only GPL or proprietary, but only on Macs, you can have both. And PC's cost the same as Macs. Thanks for the correction.

        • Right, I never saw an IT pro use Thinkpads or flagship models of any other manufacturer. Only Macs. Dualbooting is not a thing. Thinkpads or any other manufacturer machine dissolve into composite materials in less than five years. With PC (and Linux) it is only GPL or proprietary, but only on Macs, you can have both. And PC's cost the same as Macs. Thanks for the correction.

          I never said ONLY.
          I LOVE thinkpads. I just bought a new one for my personal use. Linuxed up already.
          And YES Quality PCs and Macs are pretty damn close in price.
          Lastly, and on a personal note, open your mind and fewer people will think you are an asshole.

  • Update January 21st, 4:58PM ET: Updated to reflect that the Unidays’ verification seems to have been removed from Apple’s US education store.

  • At many universities (such as mine), large departments have dedicated IT personnel who spec and place ALL IT-related purchases. So, will our department be limited to a couple of Macs for ALL of our people?

  • In general, we have nothing to blame or be angry with Apple, because they are right and act logically. In any case, great respect for the company for the educational functionality and opportunities that they offer at affordable prices. But I note that even if you are a young college student, and you do not have the opportunity to regularly pay for subscriptions from Apple, then it is worth looking on the Internet for free offers, of which there are thousands of new ones every day. I am from France and I kno

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