>I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference.

Or when they only use it to make the Apple pricing seem more favorable and ignore it when it comes to PC pricing. Most PC manufacturers also have educational pricing, whether directly or through some portal provided by your institution. I know my son's college had a deal and also had a list of the tax free days in the state so that you could pre-order and then pay and pick up on the day the tax didn't apply.

all you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses.

That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable

It may be a local thing in Bay area, but usually there’s some way to get some discount when making a purchase with Apple - be it via education, or via a corporate discount (just show your badge from another company), or via a friend who works at Apple, or some big retailers start selling at good discount (eg Amazon easily gets 5-10% lower price over time).

Anecdotally, last week I visited a local Apple Store with my son who is in middle school. Without any prompting from us, the Apple rep asked my son if he is planning to go to college some day, and applied the college discount to our purchase without my son saying much…

Because when one configures it with reasonable 32GB RAM/2TB SSD and EU prices, it suddenly becomes £1800 and it's harder to convince anyone of its price superiority.

Take a pottery course at community college. Pay $65 in tuition, get your education discount, and um, relive the scene from Ghost? :)

A lot of people have a relative or something still in education, just buy it through them. It's not like this is government subsidy, just a promotion to increase sales and maybe hope to have long term customer by hooking them at younger age. Probably much less immoral than blocking ads on YouTube.

They use it because they have an inherent bias and want to put the Mac in a position to compare favorably.

It’s trivially easy to obtain the discount. Anyone working in education, or a student at any level, k-12, higher ed, graduates with access to uni email can get it. Apple doesn’t ask any questions or for verification.

They also go on sale at a similar price to the general public relatively frequently.

We're all students of Internet University.

Shush ;)

But also a ton of people are absolutely in college, at any age, new people are coming to HN every day; I'd think HN is an easier place to discuss and explore vaguely tech/startup related topics than in school

Even Apple Store employees will freely give you the discount. Apple doesn't discount because they aren't a discount brand, but they will give you this discount if you ask.

Corporate perks brokers and Amazon also give 15% off.

But anyways, 15% is pretty much in the error fuzz range of "which platform do I like better" and "dominated by RAM upgrade price.

Educational discount is a pinky swear that you are a student or buying it for a student.

So it is in practice available to everyone if you want to ruin nice things for students.

If you continue reading the sentence, it gets even more bizarre:

> it's around €650, including VAT.

Whatever taxes and discounts apply to the commenter’s own idiosyncratic situation have nothing to do with the price of the product.

A couple of years ago, I might have cared what the price of an M2 with Pasadena sales taxes was since I lived there at the time, but I sure wouldn’t have included them when talking about Apple prices here.

Similarly, VAT costs are between you and whatever jurisdiction you live in that’s levying them. Apple isn’t the one to thank or complain to about them.

But a ton of us have a friend/kid/relative in HS or college ...

The cheating/fraudulence encouragement in this thread is disgusting. You guys are not stilling a pencil but several hundreds dollars. Paying a part of it or apple being fatty rich doesn’t make it more honest.

I don’t think I ever encounter here such collective encouragement to bypass a law (ok probably for jailbreak which is not a fraud). Not sure if the demography changes, societal culture change or just luck.

Edit: Oh and yeas I never completed college, don’t own a .edu and am maybe just subconsciously jealous.

very few on HN pay full price for Mac products ;)

> Surely very few of us on HN are still in college?

What makes you think that? I'm back in school getting a MEng degree in my 30s.