> That is a great write up. But I think this proves even more my point that people do anything to make an excuse for cheating :)
You would have an argument (not a good argument) if I ever actually took advantage of the education discount. But I don't!
(I get all my Apple computers as business-lease equipment from my employer, within which I have arbitrary IT equipment purchasing authority. And then, once they've fully depreciated, I buy those computers from my employer for a trivial sum to become my personal computer(s), and also order new current-gen work computer(s). Is this "cheating?" No, Apple loves this — my employer is paying full price, and never gets any sort of discount. And my employer also loves this — they just want me to be productive, and paying a few thousand dollars to buy whatever arbitrary equipment I requisition every two years, is extremely cheap for how much my added productivity will make them over that period. Given the different things each party in this relationship values, this is a win-win-win.)
> For others, why this would be open secret? The correct user base already gets the discount. There are no benefits to give discount for others as well, even in secret.
As roughly seven other people have replied to you: price discrimination. The user base Apple would like to help out are "individual buyers who just barely cannot afford Apple products, with a $100 discount being enough of a difference to prevent them from falling out of the funnel."
Students tend to be central members of this group; but Apple, in practice, seems to actually want to help this group as a whole.
(And why wouldn't they? It's not like they're making a loss on education-discounted sales. They're making money and getting people into the Apple ecosystem, where they'll hopefully dive deeper once they have more money!)
But there's no way to openly offer "anyone who needs a $100 discount to be convinced to buy an Apple product" that $100 discount, without either:
• sounding like you're literally calling people poor (open "means-adjusted pricing"? It's been tried; people hate it! Only ever gets aired out as a TAM-expansion tactic in markets for extremely-inelastic-demand goods with zero competition, e.g. on-patent medications.)
• or leaving a loophole for rich people to find that results in Apple not being able to milk them.
And the one thing that goes against every strand of a luxury consumer product company's DNA, is the thought of letting a rich buyer with high willingness-to-pay get away with a low-margin purchase. In Apple's business, milking one rich customer can give you the net profit of dozens of low-margin customers. (Think: convincing some Mr. Moneybags who walks into an Apple Store thinking they want a Mac Mini, that what they really need is a fully-upgraded Mac Studio.)
> However, people start posting about your beach in social media, or even in Hacker News. Friends of friends of friends tell about their friends too. Now the beach is crowded and all randoms are the all the time! What would you do? Get a bouncer or put "a real" Trespassing sign? And even your friends can't enjoy the beach anymore.
How is this comparable? As other sibling replies state, the open secret of the Apple education discount has been widely dispersed for at least a decade now. It is at equilibrium — it clearly isn't spreading to the point that "the beach is overcrowded." Ask a random person off the street — heck, ask the average person on HN five minutes before this thread started — and they would not know that Apple offers an education discount but doesn't verify academic status.
You want to know what an open secret reaching fixation looks like? Picture it being discussed in "money-saving tips" listicle videos put out by popular [i.e. tens-of-millions-of-subs] vloggers. Not even tech vloggers, either — I'm talking gaming vloggers, art vloggers, beauty vloggers, etc.
Some open secrets do run away like this — and yes, this does cause their creators to pull the plug! The Apple Store education-discount open secret is not like this.