I can't say for all states but here in Massachusetts we have an annual tax free weekend where sales tax (6.25%) is not applied for "most retail items of up to $2,500, purchased in Massachusetts for personal use" (https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-sales-tax-ho...).

Also groceries never have a sales tax in Massachusetts but, again, that varies by state.

Some places it's anything with sales tax, or maybe just goods in general if they already have low or no tax on food. Other places have it on specific goods that would be considered 'school supplies'. I think where my son is, it's a week or weekend where it's all sales tax is waived. Definitely not a corporate thing, it's to give parents and residents a break and to help stimulate the economy with spending.

And are they representation-free too?

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."

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.

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!)

In Switzerland (Europe?) we can easily get cheaper price, from official resellers, than the edu price. Apple store won't match.

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).

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.

20 years ago I worked Apple retail and this was well known then.

Tbh, it's not that much compared to Apple sales.

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/....

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.

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)

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).

€23 for 8 MB of RAM sounds a bit too expensive, to be honest.

Failing to block ads is also bad security practice.

The typical .edu discount from Apple on largish purchases is about $100, regardless of whether that's a $600 final tag or a $2000 final tag. So, somewhere between 14% and 5%.

If Apple sells 50% of Macs to the .edu discount market, that's a difference to you of somewhere between 2.5% and 7%.

Or, you can accept that Apple's prices are not set by the market so much as by their marketing department.

So is paying the full price and signalling to Apple "we can afford it just fine, don't sweat about cutting margins or lowering extra disk/RAM pricing", but I don't see you complaining about that :)

Why would that be?

You are free to purchase as many Apple products as you want to offset any perceived revenue losses from promotional discounts. I'm not so sure why you would want to do this but I keep hearing that behavioral economics is a thing, maybe paying more is your definition of rationality.

Canada also does not verify, don't ask me how I know. However, where I live now (Spain) they do have some 3rd party service verifying edu status.

I am actually currently a college student, but I can confirm that Apple did nothing to verify that this was the case when I bought mine.

I am outside of North America and have been for about 3/4 of my adult life.

The issue with adding VAT to prices on a forum with people living in a lot of different places is that VAT rates vary greatly from place to place.

To get an idea what an Apple product costs, it's more helpful to look at the price charged prior to taxes, tax deductions, educational discounts and other factors that will depend entirely on the specific cases of each reader.

You're saying this to someone who twice took a 24-hour train from Beijing to Hong Kong to buy an Apple computer for 27% less due to HK not having an additional electronics tax.

A lot of my friends in Taiwan used to buy macs in HK for the same reason.