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College Student Discount - is this right??

My daughter ordered a new computer for school. It says at the top of the apple education store "get $150 gift card". She ordered the computer, but when the charges came through there was a $150 charge for the gift card. I went to the cart and it shows -$150 which is your "savings" but then there is a second charge for $150 for the gift card.


Is this really what Apple is doing?? Basically baiting college kids to buy through their store for a gift card that you have to pay for? That is not a discount. These kids need money to pay for college, books, and food. What Apple has done (which I will argue is misleading, call it marketing semantics at best) is terrible, essentially forcing them to buy a gift card, which requires them to buy more stuff, rather than helping them with the actual cost of product as students. She could have bought the same computer from Best Buy and saved money in her overall budget for what she actually needs.


Can someone confirm this is actually what is happening?

iMac (M3, 2023)

Posted on Aug 3, 2024 8:55 AM

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Posted on Aug 18, 2024 6:20 AM

So for our other college kid, we looked at the Apple Education deal and the Mac Air she wanted was $1699 with a $150 gift card. You still have to pay $1699 and now you have a gift card for Apple that you don't necessarily need. Instead, we bought he exact same Mac Air at Best Buy on sale for $1499 so she now has $200 additional dollars for books, etc. The education discount (historically) is supposed to be about helping out students with the expenses of college, but Apple has just turned it into buy more of our stuff. It didn't used to be like that and its too bad.

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Aug 18, 2024 6:20 AM in response to FoxFifth

So for our other college kid, we looked at the Apple Education deal and the Mac Air she wanted was $1699 with a $150 gift card. You still have to pay $1699 and now you have a gift card for Apple that you don't necessarily need. Instead, we bought he exact same Mac Air at Best Buy on sale for $1499 so she now has $200 additional dollars for books, etc. The education discount (historically) is supposed to be about helping out students with the expenses of college, but Apple has just turned it into buy more of our stuff. It didn't used to be like that and its too bad.

Aug 3, 2024 9:42 AM in response to IanJKing

Apple bills the gift card separately and reduces the price of the computer by the same amount. In other words, if you buy a $2000 computer with a free $150 gift card, they bill $1850 and $150 for a total of @$2000. You get a free gift card as advertised.

I suspect that they do that to simplify return issues (e.g., the issue of someone returning the computer without the gift card).

College Student Discount - is this right??

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