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Apple’s Back to School promo is live – Image credit: Apple
The annual Apple Back to School deals are live, but while free AirPods or Magic Keyboards are nice to get with purchase, you really should consider shopping around for better offers.
Apple’s Back to School promotion for people in higher education has launched in the United States. Building on top of the usual special pricing for education users, the promotion offers a little bit extra for education users gearing up for the academic year ahead.
However, while the 2024 Back to School offers were gift cards, Apple is instead offering a selection of accessories to go with a selection of its products. Something that may not necessarily be that great a deal for consumers.
Apple’s 2024 Back to School offers
The offers this time are for accessories, and affect five specific products in the Apple catalog.
The eligible products include:
While the gift card offers of 2024 are reasonably easy to understand, the 2025 accessories deal is a little less simple. Depending on the product range, customers can get one of a selection of accessories that will work with the hardware.
The confusing bit is that some of the accessories are included completely for free, but others require an additional fee. Only part of the value of the more expensive accessories, including the AirPods Pro 2 and the Magic Keyboard for iPad, is covered by Apple with a fee payable to cover the remainder of the cost.
The accessories under iMac are:
The MacBook accessories list includes:
- AirPods 4 with ANC
- AirPods Pro 2 ($70 fee)
- Magic Mouse
- Magic Trackpad
- Magic Keyboard with Touch ID
For the iPads, the list is longer:
- Apple Pencil Pro
- AirPods 4
- AirPods 4 with ANC ($50 fee)
- AirPods Pro 2 ($120 fee)
- Magic Keyboard for iPad Air 11-inch ($130 fee)
- Magic Keyboard for iPad Air 13-inch ($180 fee)
- Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro 11-inch ($160 fee)
- Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro 13-inch ($210 fee)
As well as the accessories, there’s also education pricing, which cuts the price of the Mac or iPad. The page also says that eligible students can save up to 10% on AppleCare+ protection for their purchases.
The upshot for 2025’s collection is that you will save money if you were going to buy one of the accessories anyway, but you may end up being tempted to spend the education pricing saving to get a higher tier of accessory under the offer, too.
Deeper savings elsewhere
If you aren’t interested in the collection of accessories, completely free or with fees attached, the education pricing discount may not be that great otherwise. In many cases, you can find better deals through other retailers.
A good starting point to track down the offers are the AppleInsider Price Guides, which scours online stores for discounts on Apple’s product range. It’s an easy way to compare what Apple is currently selling products for against third-party storefronts.
In many cases, you will find offers that are better than Apple’s education pricing.
For the iPad Air, Apple’s selling the 11-inch from $549 in its Education Store, with the 13-inch starting from $749. These base-model offers are savings of $50 off the full retail prices.
By comparison, you can pick up the 128GB 13-inch M3 iPad Air with Wi-Fi for just $699 and the 11-inch variant for $499 from Amazon. Both of these are $100 off the full retail price, and $50 below Apple’s own education discount.
Another example is the 13-inch MacBook Air with M4. The lowest-priced model in Apple’s educational store, equipped with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of storage, is priced at $899, or $100 below full retail.
However, you can save a larger $150 by getting it for $849 from Amazon, B&H Photo, or Best Buy.
Apple’s new back to school program can still be a great deal if you want to go beyond just the base hardware and secure some first-party accessories at the same time. If that doesn’t matter and you want to minimize your overall outlay, the better deals are found via retail partners.
