Sachin Agarwal: My Memories of Apple | Hacker News Reader

Sachin Agarwal: My Memories of Apple

sachin.posterous.com

52 pointsashishbharthi15 comments

"To pay off my college loans and car loan, I bought Macs from the bookstore and sold them on eBay. This consumed my life for about 3 weeks."

So you're the reason why they put the limits on education purchases.

Dick move.

Well (hopefully), now he'll be remembered as "the guy that ruined education discounts so he could buy an audi and have a free education"... Talk about over-privileged...

Better than being the guy who ruined education discounts to serve his meth habit.

Are education discounts ruined now? I haven't been in a college store in a while.

I think it's actually quite clever, with very little downside, either morally or ethically.

The worst that happens is that they configure the education program so you can only buy one system a year (or some other such limitation) - which seems eminently reasonable for an education program.

As long as Apple was willing to sell unlimited numbers of Macintoshes in the bookstore for a discount, not sure why a clever and hard working person _wouldn't_ engage in a little arbitrage.

This is the kind of behavior you quite often see in successful startup founders, btw.

Except you are prioritizing your own short-term gain over the long-term benefit to a larger group of people. Apple would have figured it out very quickly and would have taken steps to regain control of their pricing.

It is a program that provides financial benefit to poor students in exchange for a moral obligation. I see it as being more akin to stealing from a charity rather than a savvy or smart business opportunity. Being entrepreneurial is about providing a product or service to people, but not doing it at the cost to all others. It takes zero imagination to take advantage of a goodwill initiative, all it requires is a lack of moral compass.

I was a super-poor student from a low income family and I relied on both educational discounts and financing to get access to my own computer - so to know now that the program was screwed with by guys who were not exactly starving students really pisses me off.

The program wasn't "Screwed" - they just set limits on how much you could purchase per year. Any student who was actually low-income, or required educational discounts/financing, was almost certainly not impacted - how many of those are buying more than one Desktop, Mini and Notebook/year. I make a decent salary - and even I don't refresh my notebook more than once every two years (and, on occasion, go almost three years without a refresh)

Here is the Apple Educational Policy from: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/open/salespolicies/edu

"Faculty, Staff and Students purchasing from the Apple Store for Education Individuals will be allowed to purchase the following quantities of product per academic school year. Not all products have special Education Pricing.

  1. Desktop: One (1) may be purchased per academic year
  2. Mac mini: One (1) may be purchased per academic year
  3. Notebook: One (1) may be purchased per academic year
  4. Display: A maximum of two (2) may be purchased per 
     academic year
  5. Software: A maximum of two (2) per software title may 
     be purchased per academic year"

easy there bro. There were already restrictions on education purchases when I did this. I worked with the bookstore director directly to buy in volume. It was all in the open.

> I remember waking up one morning to find a strange man setting up a Mac LC II in my room. I don't know who he was or why we chose to buy an Apple computer, but on that day, history was made

So who was this guy? and, history being made? really? When I think about historic moments I think about the Berlin Wall, September 11, or the Japanese delegation boarding the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor to sign the surrender of Japan. I definitely don't associate it with some guy getting his first Mac

a post about apple includes my memories about apple. why the hate?

Awesome so he idealizes a dude who parks in Handicapped parking (without a number plate).

What kind of world do we live in?

Maybe it was after Jobs fell ill?

No: he says it was for his first interview at Apple. If he was employed at Apple before the first iPod announcement then that would be well before Jobs fell ill.

I've read that there a quite a lot of handicapped people that are against these signs, and separation.

That justify for anyone to behave the way Steve did.

Down Voting? Damn Fan Boyism.

i understand the hate on parking in the handicapped spot. but seriously there are 4 there and were NEVER used. He packed in the furthest away of the 4

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