Lots of people are “defecting” (as the masses would say it) or “converting” (as the enlightened would say it) to the Mac platform. But it kills me when people haven’t taken advantage of the pricing structure that Apple offers.
I was going to write up a full post on this, but I might as well let someone else do the talking.
The main point, however, is that if you’re a student: Regardless of your major, you should not be getting your higher end Apple products through the educational discount. Instead, you should join Apple Developer Connection (ADC) and buy it through that.
Example: My MacBook Pro. For $99 (and a little hassle of scanning in your ID and sending it to Apple), you’re saving $200 on top of the educational discount. Overall, you save $100.
Of course, what they don’t tell you… is that when you first join ADC, they send you a nice DVD for OS X. I sold it immediately on eBay for $70. Then I got yet another OS CD… not sure why, but I sold that too. In the end, I paid for an extra 1 GB of memory this way.
And I didn’t think about this one, but… try to see if you know of any friends that work for Apple. It’s even cheaper than ADC.