Apple usually reduces the price even further for educational sales. It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting. It’s good enough for those settings.
This can't be good for Apple's reputation amongst kids in school though! Apple is basically pulling what Chrysler and GM used to do with rental cars where they sold an even cheaper version for rental use. It gives a terrible first impression of your product.
Lab settings? What school is buying hardware these days? The majority in my area are either investing in Chromebooks and dropping purchases of their own devices, or making kids buy Chromebooks.
They aren't buying iMacs, either. I work at one of the largest unis in the US and everything is dell optiplex from the libraries, to the lecture halls, to the research labs, and the hospitals. The only iMacs I've seen are requested specifically by faculty for their office, or are 10 years old in some windowless back room hooked up to a random microscope running snow leopard. That being said, I've never set foot near any art buildings so I don't know what happens in there regarding their machines.
Are many colleges buying computers at all? My university CS and engineering schools both just required that students supply their own computer that was sufficient for the coursework.
Yes. There are departments outside of the CS and engineering schools and also colleges that cater to lower income students that don't require you to purchase a computer.
The only time we use it for labs is running Adobe stuff, and given what students want to learn, you do need decent performing machines and something with a 5400 rpm drive is not it.
