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by ghshephard 5328 days ago
I think it's actually quite clever, with very little downside, either morally or ethically.

The worst that happens is that they configure the education program so you can only buy one system a year (or some other such limitation) - which seems eminently reasonable for an education program.

As long as Apple was willing to sell unlimited numbers of Macintoshes in the bookstore for a discount, not sure why a clever and hard working person _wouldn't_ engage in a little arbitrage.

This is the kind of behavior you quite often see in successful startup founders, btw.
1 comments
nikcub 5328 days ago
Except you are prioritizing your own short-term gain over the long-term benefit to a larger group of people. Apple would have figured it out very quickly and would have taken steps to regain control of their pricing.

It is a program that provides financial benefit to poor students in exchange for a moral obligation. I see it as being more akin to stealing from a charity rather than a savvy or smart business opportunity. Being entrepreneurial is about providing a product or service to people, but not doing it at the cost to all others. It takes zero imagination to take advantage of a goodwill initiative, all it requires is a lack of moral compass.

I was a super-poor student from a low income family and I relied on both educational discounts and financing to get access to my own computer - so to know now that the program was screwed with by guys who were not exactly starving students really pisses me off.

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ghshephard 5328 days ago
The program wasn't "Screwed" - they just set limits on how much you could purchase per year. Any student who was actually low-income, or required educational discounts/financing, was almost certainly not impacted - how many of those are buying more than one Desktop, Mini and Notebook/year. I make a decent salary - and even I don't refresh my notebook more than once every two years (and, on occasion, go almost three years without a refresh)

Here is the Apple Educational Policy from: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/open/salespolicies/edu

"Faculty, Staff and Students purchasing from the Apple Store for Education Individuals will be allowed to purchase the following quantities of product per academic school year. Not all products have special Education Pricing.

  1. Desktop: One (1) may be purchased per academic year
  2. Mac mini: One (1) may be purchased per academic year
  3. Notebook: One (1) may be purchased per academic year
  4. Display: A maximum of two (2) may be purchased per 
     academic year
  5. Software: A maximum of two (2) per software title may 
     be purchased per academic year"
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