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.
I think you are missing the point. The person who mentioned educational pricing was asking if there are any machines with comparable performance and silence for that little a price, and said that the educational price is €650.
Suppose I know of a non-Mac that has similar performance and silence for €1000 non-educational. To decide if that meets the requirement I'd need to either look up the non-educational price of the Mac to compare to €1000 or I'd need to look up the educational price of the €1000 machine (if it has one) to compare with €650.
They are more likely to get useful answers if they post the non-educational price so that people don't have to do extra work to figure out if they should respond.
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 :)
Companies tend to focus on the overall % profit margin for a product. If a higher percentage of sales are for a discounted (edu) SKU with lower margins, they will tend to raise the price of the product to hit their desired profit margin.
e.g. If a company was selling a product at $1000, and wanted to offer a 20% discount for EDU that would be bought by 50% of the market, they would need to raise the price by about 10% to keep the same margin. If only 20% of the market bought the discounted SKU, they could keep the same margins with only a 5% (?) increase in price to the rest of the SKUs.
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.
It’s basic market economics. More discounted purchases tends to lead to an increase in the non discounted price. Of course, that’s baked in at outset. Apple knows x% of sales come with a edu discount so the non-edu price is offset to account for the edu discount. I don’t have any problem with a vendor doing that. It’s how they forecast a profit margin. Apple, apparently, has allowed “people who know someone in education to also claim an edu discount” to be part of their pricing model that ultimately leads to increased prices for those those do not know someone with an edu email.
