Every year around this time, I get a little excited for what Apple is going to do for their “Back To School” sale. This year, I was even more excited. In recent past, in each sale, if you bought a Mac, you got a free iPod Touch. Well, with the new iPod Touches and with the reality of possibly getting a new Mac this summer, I was more than excited to see this sale come out. But, I was somewhat shocked when I found out that this year there would be no free iPod Touches. Instead, you get something else.
Gone are the iPod Touches and in are the $100 gift cards. Talk about a let down. Oh well, I digress. Here is the deal with the sale. If you buy a Mac at the education price, you will get a $100 gift card to spend on iTunes, the Mac App Store, or iBooks. In order to qualify for the education price, you have to either be a student or a faculty and be able to show proof.
Now, if I step away from my greediness for an iPod Touch, I can see why doing the gift card makes a lot of sense. This sale is really for students and Apple really wants to get more students to buy their Macs. With this target audience in mind, it makes sense to do gift cards. When you think about it, most students that will be buying a Mac this summer are probably somewhere in their teens or early twenties. And you can probably bet that at least 80%, if not more, will have already have an iPod Touch or iPhone. So really, there would be no need for it. With the $100 gift card, this automatically promotes students to buy more software for their Mac from the Mac App Store. This should definitely make app developers very happy as well as Apple.
So, as much as I am bummed that when I go and get my Macbook Air this summer, I won’t be getting an iPod Touch, I can see why Apple did this. They definitely had the student in mind. So, if you are a student or education faculty and are in need of a Mac, now is the time to be taking advantage of this sale. The sale runs from June 16, 2011 to Sept. 20, 2011.
[ilink url=”http://store.apple.com/us/browse/campaigns/back_to_school”]Apple Back to School Offer – Apple Store[/ilink]