Last night, I remembered something that you will no doubt thank me for later. When Mac OS X Tiger came out a few years ago, I was ready to buy it. I had my $130 in hand and was waiting in line. But as I approached the cash register, I ran into a coworker I knew and he told me that the University of Pennsylvania’s bookstore, which was right down the block, was selling copies to students for only $40.00. Being the cheapskate I am, I dropped the box I was holding and we headed out.
Sure enough, upon arrival at the bookstore, OS X Tiger was only $40.00. Neither of us went to UPenn, so we grabbed some dorky kid walking past us and asked him to buy it for us. He did, my coworker and I split a copy and I get Mac OS X Tiger for $20. So, if you have a college bookstore near you, I suggest taking a peak in there. You may find incredible discounts when Leopard comes out, you may not. It’s up to you to seek out the hot deals near you!
Editor’s Note: It’s worth mentioning that it was only the UPenn bookstore that was offering the OS for $40. Everywhere else, it was regular academic price. This is no different than you getting a hookup from your buddy at Best Buy or any other retailer. If you had a friend at UPenn, were broke and could get OS X for $40, you’re telling me you wouldn’t ask him/her to pick up a copy for you? Puh-lease.
Why didn’t you get 38 more friends/people and pay a dollar?
Thanks for the tip. :-)
Notice he said he wasn’t a student of UPenn…doesn’t mean he is not a student somewhere else, meaning he could be entitled to the academic price.
And I doubt this is the reason Apple doesn’t give students as good a a dicsount anymore. It’s probably due to it’s increasing popularity and Apple’s growing greediness.
Even the Woz seems disgraced by Apple’s current direction.
Because of people like you, apple increased the student price this time.
The student price that Apple increased is not the same as the one being described. I personally don’t see anything wrong with this. It’s dishonest but a student did buy it, although not for himself. It’s like buying a $2000 Macbook Pro at my school for $1700 for a relative or friend etc.
It’s dishonest, but “(you) don’t see anything wrong with this”?
I have no way of course to know the age of these posters or their personal circumstances, but is it simply that younger people who have not established a body of work, experience, and perhaps families just simply have no clue?
Why do people want to pay for software, I’m a developer and i have never paid for a piece of software ever apart from games. If software houses wanted people to buy their products then they should not set such ridiculous prices for them. I’ve just bought a mac a couple of months ago and I think it’s mint but I’m not paying £80 for a fricking upgrade, free all the way. At the end of the day I’ve just given £700 pounds to apple for their hardware so surely I’m entitled to the latest version for free. Companies such as Microsoft and Apple make enough money out of corporate licenses, if Windows had only ever been £40 I would have definitely paid for a legit copy but no they have to get greedy and set a really high price, it’s the same with the music and film industry, if they charged less in the first place then most people would feel bad about piracy and simply reach into their pocket. I think some people need to work out their ethics and take their head out of their arse and stop being so pretentious.
You’re kidding, right? Oh, please…come back and revisit this idea when the company you work for has to shut down and lay you off (make you redundant, is that the right term?) because the software you develop has been so popular and widely pirated that there is no longer enough profit to keep in business.
No, Apple is unlikely to go out of business because of this one instance, but piracy like this does have an effect, and if it’s okay to do it to Apple, isn’t it okay to do it to the small specialty development company that has 2 employees?
you guys all have good points, but all are wrong about some things. you should be mad that big companys like apple and microsoft rip us off so bad, when they already have enough money through all of their other products and endorsements, however stealing (sharing with others) an OS that you did not even pay half of regular price for is just ridiculous. My solution is instead of getting pissed about this sh*t, just ask a friend or family to get you the OS you want, and dual boot it on a PC. *****you can put MAC on a PC now!!! its fairly easy!!!****** just saying.
happy holidays.
Who gets to decide what is “enough” money? and what does that have to do with following an established legal code?
Did anyone ever wonder why the Leopard academic price (online) went up in the first place? Perhaps because of practices like this…
(And yes, I know this blog has died. Just figured it was worth weighing in)
What’s your problem people? We already have to pay for the Apple hardware, why should we then have to spend another couple hundred on an OS that gets updated like annually
And… you obviously don’t get it. Don’t worry. Keep studying. One day you’ll understand Econ 101.
you guys seen that 2 guys 1 horse video? siiiiiiick!
:/ pretty good idea as far as im concerned. some people just dont care about licence agreements nobody in their right mind is going to read through one of those awful things unless they are bored…
why are people getting so pissed at this post? Hell apple already has millions and millions. This guy getting a deal is nothing bad. Plus not everyone can do this so it’s not like it even hurt Mac to begin with. I’d do the same damn thing! I did try to use a friends Leopard disk to upgrade mine but it would work! It showed the new background but it wouldn’t go past that part. We both have the same computer (Black MacBook). What is up with that?
Why is it considered stealing if the option to get product cheaper or free exists? Stealing implies the product has one value and the thief undermined that value. We live in a competitive market which results in a product that now has more than one value.
What happened here was not theft but exploitation, and as these huge corporations continuously exploit consumers I think it’s only natural that eventually consumers would end up exploiting corporations. I paid over $3000 for my mac and less than a year later Im required to drop at least $130 to keep up with the latest technology wave?
If I can get it for $20 Im going to do that knowing full well within 6 months Im again going to subject myself to charges of fraud in order to get EagleEye v13.5.7(made it up). The point is I dont want to pay $130 and the smartest thing for Mac to do is lower the price if they are concerned with the amount of money they are losing to fraud and piracy. Thats what Itunes did. If you can’t stop ‘em join ‘em:)
I’m sure he’s not the first to recommend a way to save money. You’re all a bunch of bitches!
I’m a high school student, i completely rebuilt my f*cked imac by buying used parts because i can’t afford apples ridiculous replacement prices for generic parts. even then, i spent over $600 alone just fixing it. that on top of $1200 for the piece of sh*t itself, plus another $600 for final cut pro, which is the only reason why i even have a mac, and that turns into minimum wage hours at my local grocery store. apples prices are ridiculous. they over glorify their computers because of their name, so yeah, i really wouldn’t care if someone else strapped for cash after purchasing an over priced PC took advantage of the student discount, I’m sure they were a student at one time anyway, and its not like they aren’t paying anything for it anyways. it seems to me like if apple is going to sell they’re machines for so much they should offer free os upgrade downloads, as a service to their customers whom they have already taken advantage of.
All you naysayers suck. Not everyone has $140 to blow on a freaking UPGRADE. Apple is NOT hurting for money and he paid for the damn thing, just at a huge discount. Suck it up and get off your high horse. I bet none of you have ever sped or failed to come to a complete stop at a stop-sign either? Overstayed at a parking meter? Right. So STFU.
I know I’m a little late to the argument, but I do know – at least at my alma mater, where I worked at the campus computer store – when a school offers a program for less than the academic price, it’s the school that’s paying the difference. So you not only stole from Apple, you also stole from UPenn. Congratulations. Your mother must be proud.
I don’t understand why everyone’s so upset either. Apple doesn’t exactly require some kind of product registration key before you can use the upgraded OS (unlike a **certain** popular OS), so one installation DVD can be used by a bunch of ppl. Look, OSX is great, but it’s not exactly a breakthrough. It’s based on BSD (which is free), I remember seeing some of the cool features (like Spaces in Leopard) in Ubuntu 7.04, again available for free. Another thing, as much as I like Apple products, I don’t like the direction that it’s going. The other day I was at an Apple store looking for a new battery for my 1st gen MacBook. I was looking @ the latest gen MacBooks and noticed something profoundly disturbing: you can’t see the battery. I asked the young guy who was working there how you change the battery on those things, and he said that it was gonna have to be a service. That probably means, in addition to the cost of the battery, you need to pay service fee for the “Genius” to change your batt. That’s not a problem if you have AppleCare, but if you don’t? So you see that Apple is ripping you off too. I don’t see how you ripping Apple off 80 dollars using a fake ID is such a bad thing, when: 1. you can pull off the same thing w/o using a fake ID, and 2. Apple wants to charge you to change your battery for you.