The Apple Education Store in the US is following a trend that has existed in the United Kingdom and the European Union for years. If you plan to get a discount when buying a new Mac or iPad for education purposes, you need to prove that you’re currently enrolled in a participating university.
The Apple Education Store has existed for a long time, but in the United States it has never required users to prove that they’re actually a student. Even though Apple has always said that it could ask someone for proof, the company never did. Now, it’s changing as you need to get verified with UNiDAYS to get a 10% discount on selected products.
Not only that, but Apple Education Store now limits customers to buying only one product per category in a year, which means you can’t buy two Macs with a discount in the same year. On the other hand, you can buy a Mac and then an iPad with a 10% discount.
The Apple Education Store offers discounts for students and university faculty to get products like the Mac and the iPad at a special price. Even with this discount, it’s often easier to find better deals from other stores for most products. That being said, the Apple Education Store can be a good deal when a product is recently launched.
With this new verification method, it’s likely that some customers will struggle to get the discount as, for example, homeschooled kids need to provide “an institution portal login, an institution issued personal email address or an institution issued student ID card” to be able to get a UNiDAYS account.
Apple also uses UNiDAYS to verify the eligibility of students to get a 50% discount on the Apple Music plan, bundled with Apple TV+.
It’s still unclear whether the company plans to extend this requirement to all Apple Education Stores around the globe or not.
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