NYC362

So here's the deal... and this doctor is an idiot.. or just trying to scam Apple.   Former Expert here who dealt with stuff like this about ten thousand times. 

You buy an iPad Pro, it costs $999.  You're eligible for the education discount, so now the price is $899.  That is a year round deal.  But since the back to school promo is going on, you also get a $100 gift card.

When you look at your receipt you'll see that you were charged $799 for the iPad, and $100 for the gift card.  The total is $899.  The same as without the gift card, but you do have a $100 gift card to spend.  

Why does Apple do the transaction this way?

Simple, customers would take advantage of the deal, then try to return the iPad.  If they weren't charged for the card, and the value of the card wasn't take off the product, you'd still have that gift card.  Now, you try to return the item, if you come in both product and UNUSED gift card, you get your full $899 back.  What if you used part of the gift card?  What if you didn't have it?  Well, now you get your $799 back and you get to keep the gift card- after all you paid for it.

Going back to the summer 2020, I worked at home doing post order service for Apple, and the back to school deal wasn't a gift card, but AirPods.  I cannot even guess how many people tried to return the product thinking they'd get to keep free AirPods.  No, silly people... you paid for those AirPods, but we'll gladly refund you the reduced price of the product you bought to get them

It's all pretty simple except I guess for doctors who can't do arithmetic.

I often leave comments on this site using my past experience as an Expert at an Apple Store for about 4½ years.   Here I can use my pre-Apple experience- 32 years as a public high school teacher.

What Eton is doing is a good thing.  Students are WAY too connected to their phones.  Some years back, I had to take one from a student who just refused to put it away.  A few minutes later, another student tells me that first kid was now cutting herself.  Yes, she was using some relatively sharp to make straight line bruises on an arm.  If the object was any sharper, she would have been bleeding all over the place.

That might be an extreme example, but you get the idea. 

The constant connection to the internet and to each other takes away from learning. Simple as that.  If they are paying attention to their phone, they are not paying attention to the lesson at hand.  

A number of years ago, an MIT professor tried a small experiment in his lecture.  He had half the class operate as normal, meaning they had phones, tablets, and laptops out.  They were all multitasking- listening to him and watching whatever online.  The other half just had pen and paper, or maybe a computer, but agreed to not use the internet.  The professor gives a lecture, a rather basic one, and then gives everyone a short quiz on it.  As you might expect, the students that were not multitasking did quite a bit better than those who were. 

Finally, if I am a parent and I'm paying tens of thousands of pounds for my son to go to Eton, he damn well better be paying attention to the instructors and not his phone.

I still find it hard to believe that Apple is going to let the Mac Studio sit with an M2 all the way up to the point when an M5 chip will either be announced or just weeks away.   No matter how small the market may be for Mac Studios and Mac Pro, to let them sit for almost two years between updates these days just makes no sense at all.

I don't remember using ICQ all that much.  But you also mention IRC in the article and that had the capability to be amazing.

I will never forget getting into a chatroom the night of Princess Diana's fatal car accident (August 31, 1997) and there was one poster who was putting up information 15 minutes or so before all the news services at the time on TV and radio.  As the news was not good, people were cursing him.  I got into a private chat and he told me that his brother-in-law worked in the hospital she was brought too.  His server information did show Paris, and when he told me (he didn't want to post it publicly) that she had died, sure enough ten minutes later, the BBC (being simulcast by CBS here in the US) had the official bulletin.

That was the moment I realized just how powerful the Internet was going to be.

Several months ago, I had a customer who had bought a new iPad for her young autistic son. The old one was working, but it was old- had battery issues, etc. He used it to communicate with his parents and teachers through a program that had phrases associated with various icons on the screen. I forget the name of the program. For whatever reason, the program did not back to iCloud and getting the set up to the new machine was an issue. Re-creating the various words and phrases would be time consuming enough, but they also had to be in the same location on the screen or it would completely confuse the child. The parent could not figure out how to transfer the set up to the new iPad and was truly worried that her son was going to lose his means of communication. It took a little bit of digging around but I was able to figure out how to save the set up as a file, then AirDrop it to the new iPad and then get the app to use that as its default file. In any event, it was amazing to see how these devices truly can change a life. I think that often gets forgotten around here or other Apple related tech sites as we nitpick about various features or specifications that most of the public doesn't really care about.