discounts on iMacs eg. Student

blackswan2

Hi there,

My home PC has recently died after 10 years of, occasionally, passable service. So we are looking to replace.

Thinking of getting an iMac, max budget £999, but ideally less than that. Want decent performance, but don't play any fancy games etc. at least 500GB hard drive and 21" screen.

My daughter is a sixth form student so hoping to maybe get a student discount - is this possible? On Apple's website it only applies to university students and John Lewis don't seem to do a student discount.

Any help appreciated :-)

PS I need to get data of hard drive from old PC (Dell 8300) - assuming it is straightforward to remove, are there some sort of devices that will enable me to connect it to iMac, eg. via USB, to get off the data I want?

InsideInsurance

To get Apple's student discount you need to buy directly from Apple otherwise your down to whatever offer the retailer your using does for students. I believe they do give discounts to colleges as well as universities but the discounts do vary by educational institution with uni's getting the highest.

You can buy an external caddy for the old drive to put it in. Depending on what file format it was formatted in will dictate if you need to install anything onto the mac (as well as if you want read only or read/ write permission)

windyng

Apple discount is very good for students.

You get 10-15% off the laptop and i'm sure they throw in 3 years parts and labour cover as well. Worth checking though.

Your daughter will have to sign into the educational section on the apple website or ring up and confirm she is a student.

2Ialtag

The discount is more generous for university students than for college students, with the cheapest iMac on the higher education store costing £879.60 with a free £70 app voucher (until 21st September), while the iMac starts from £939.60 in the further education store (I'm not able to post links, but search for 'Apple Education Store, click on the first result, then click on 'shop now'). Refurbished iMacs are also available from time to time but only the 27 inch model is currently available.

It might be worth waiting a while though - new iMacs are likely to be announced later this year as they haven't been updated since May last year.

almillar

There's the Education store, and the Further Education store.
You can access and purchase through the Education store through the website no problem, try again. The Further Education Store is designed to only be accessible from certain Uni etc networks.
Roughly 10% on Edu and 14% on Further Edu.
As above, stick the HDD from the Dell into a USB enclosure, plug it in and away you go. I'll assume it's NTFS formatted, which means that your Mac will only have read access.

blackswan2

thanks all - will get imac from Apple education store.
Any ideas how I find out what sort of enclosure/caddy I need for the HDD drive? It's a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7

InsideInsurance

Assuming it is an SATA connection, which unless it is very old it will be, then just get any that take your fancy.

Current iMacs dont support USB 3.0 so no point paying extra for that unless you'll be using it with another computer. They do have Firewire 800 ports but probably isnt worth the extra for that unless you are going to be frequently using after the initial month or so of transfering data across

fishybusiness

I have a Western Digital drive with USB and firewire ports.

Works really well, and tend to use firewire over USB. Also, consider you may want to use it for backup with Time Machine.

Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a reason why firewire is desirable, something to do with booting for recovery purposes. Maybe someone else can come up with the reasons.

InsideInsurance

Firewire is useful because it is massively faster than USB 2.0, particularly for sustained data transfer

Millionaire

You might want to wait. Apple might be announcing new iMacs on the 12th of this month

Im_just_careful

If the old computer really won't start up then I suggest something like "Dynamode 3.5 inch SATA and IDE Slim Line Storage Disk Caddie" from Amazon at about £12 to take the old disk.

If the old PC will boot then you can connect both old and new computers to your broadband and share the folder with the data on the old PC and copy it to the Mac.