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Apple Cuts Prices for Educational Customers
Eharley writes "Over the weekend, Apple's online educational store lowered prices on its computers and upgrade components by 5-15%. Now the 12" Al PowerBook starts at $1399. If you have a computer on order that hasn't shipped you probably already received an email about the price drop and will have your account credited the difference. However, if you're like me and always seem to buy things the week before they have their prices reduced, you may still be eligible for a refund provided you act fast."
Shouldn't the limited front page space on Slashdot be reserved for interesting stuff?
It is. This story doesn't appear on the front page.
Or is Apple on the verge of buying hAndover or OSDN or whatever the overlords of Slashdot are called these days??
No, but I detect your jealousy of Apple.
When there are international pricing differences, why is it everyone assumes it's Apple's fault? There could be lots of possible reasons. Tariffs and shipping costs that they don't include with the price. Local taxes. Fluctuation in currency rates which prevents easy savings translation. (Well, if we lower this price by x here, we'd lower it y there today but z tomorrow.) Costs of local versions of the software. (And yes, even for Canada. I remember complaints early on for OS X about the included dictionary was either American or UK English, neither of which worked correctly for Canadian.)
I'm not trying to overly defend them. But International Boundaries make a mess of a lot of free trade; it's just a matter of where it shows up. And it is possible that Apple Education America and Apple Education Canada are entirely seperate entities with seperate budgets makeing their own decisions. In this case, they would do things seperately to increase their sales but meet their budgets.
Now, I don't work for Apple (as much I as may wish I did). It may be that none of these are true and someone up top did say 'Meh - don't give it to foreigners!'. I just don't think it was that cold-bloodily simple.
As for the student developer program, that probably has most to do with whatever software/services they offer and the distribution rights Apple has for them, or the level of administration they can apply towards it. I'm sure they are aware that growing an international community of developers would help them massively long term, so I doubt they simply don't want to do it.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Apple just lost New York City's school district to Dell. Funding cuts are stabbing at the heart of our educational system...as it's the Republican's plan to 'phase out' public education for a voucher system (don't worry about the children who get a crappy education during this period, they'll do fine!).
In the short term, it seems to make financial sense to drop Apple for Dell. Just like it seems to make financial sense to pass $300 billion in 'tax cuts,' (actually just deferring payments until somebody else is in office). But the board of education will soon find out that the human costs of IT will far outweigh the benefits of a one-time savings.
All in all, this is just another case of immediate gratification over future growth and stability. Sorry Apple, but the price cuts are hitting hard up against IT propellerheads looking for job security.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Another possibility is that Apple realizes how many incoming students are buying their college dorm room computers right now, and want to capture a little more of that slice of pie.
--saint
You'll dual boot for about 2 months. Then you'll realize that you never use Linux and that it's just taking up disk space that you could use to store your iTunes collection. Seriously, OS X is for all practical purposes Unix, and there's very, very little that Linux can do that OS X can't.