Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!pucc!FTWILSON
From: FTWILSON@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Frederick Todd Wilson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: educational Mac pricing
Message-ID: <10660@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 7 Mar 90 15:06:34 GMT
References: <7887@tank.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: FTWILSON@pucc.Princeton.EDU
Distribution: usa
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 37
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article

In article <7887@tank.uchicago.edu>, gft_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:

>[...]
>>>>                    Penn   New York  Brandeis
>>>>CPU               student   street   Student
> [price stuff deleted]
>
>BTW, anybody know how these people sell for so little?  Are they just cutting
>their own margin?
>
>Robert
>
>============================================================================
Without knowing exactly what ad, from what dealer, in what paper, etc. in
which these prices showed up, it's impossible to say for sure. But, in theory,
it should be very difficult for dealers to undercut a campus price. Nobody
outside Apple gets better prices than ed. institutions.

Prices as listed from the schools above are usually the result of campus
resale that has a lot of overhead (space, inventory, salaries, etc.). This
is one way by which campus prices could be higher than street.

Another possibility is that there may be some fine print to the deal in the
paper, and that fine print may not even be in the ad. For example, many
dealers purchase bare-bones systems from Apple, and then OEM non-Apple HDs.
(Sure, they'll be Quantums, but not the ones Apple installed.) For this
reason its actually very important to ask a dealer who manufactures the
drive mechanism and if it was Apple installed (that is, if you care).

One last thing is that dealers sometimes put conditions of sale in fine
print (like: Get price XXXX on a Mac SE/30 [when you buy this peripheral
with it]). Sometimes these are Apple generated, sometimes not.

So, there are some ideas on that. Hope it answers some questions.

Todd Wilson
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own, etc.