10 Ways To Save Money When Buying Apple Products

Apple products are expensive, but you can often save a little buy buying refurbished items, using educational discounts, looking for sales at third-party sites, and using other money-saving techniques.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some ways you can save money when buying Apple products.
Now, no doubt about it, Apple products are expensive. But there are some ways you can save money when buying a new one. For instance, you can go to the Apple Refurbished Store. So these are most commonly products that were returned and then get refurbished by Apple, sometimes replacing entire parts inside of the device. Then checked over and Apple gives you a special one year warranty with them.
So if you go to apple.com/shop/refurbished you can browse through these. So for instance if you're looking for a new Mac you can look at the refurbished Macs, choose the model that you want, let's say an iMac here, see what is available and you can see how much money you'll save over buying this one new. I, myself, have bought many Apple refurbished products and have been very happy with them. You can also buy refurbished Apple products from other retailers, although it is really common online to see lots of people complaining about issues with those. I'm sure the majority of them are good. I've never tried to buy one from someone else myself.
Now you can also buy Apple products from stores other than Apple. Some are online. Some are brick & mortar. For instance here's a well-known well established online shop that sells computers and you can see that they occasionally run deals where you'll save money off of Apple's price. Here's another one very well known and you'll find most of Apple's products here and sometimes they will have specials and you get a little bit off of the price from Apple. Other times you'll actually get new Apple products that Apple has recently stopped selling. So you get those a little cheaper and you may not be able to find them from Apple at all.
If you're a student you can get a discount from Apple on some products. If you go to Apple.com/us-edu/store for instance you're in the US Educational Store. You're going to see all the Apple products listed here. When you go to take a look at them you'll see that the prices are adjusted for educational pricing. It's been a long time since I've been able to use this but I think at some point you have to identify yourself as a student, maybe which school you go to. That kind of thing. Sometimes you can also go to College School Stores and they'll have Apple products for sale there and they'll have the educational discount as well.
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Another way to save money is to trade-in your old Mac product when upgrading. This is most commonly done with iPhones but it can be done with Macs as well. You can go to Apple.com/shop/trade-in and you can give information about your product and get a quote from them about how much you'll get when you trade it in. I've done this before with iPhones and you can either set it up so you can trade-in the old iPhone after updating to the new one or you can have the trade-in ready and swap it right there at the store.
Now, of course, another way to save money is to buy a used product instead of a new one. You can find plenty of used Macs, iPads, and iPhones for sale online. Of course you've got to be very careful because there are a lot of scammers out there, both the ones scamming you completely like there is no product or it is a different product or the ones that just simply aren't telling you about some issue with it. For this reason I completely avoid buying things like used Macs online. However, sometimes we get chances to buy a used Mac from a friend or family member, somebody we trust and that can be a really good deal. Also, there are stores that sell used Macs and if you know one in your area, particularly if it you know it has been there for a long time, maybe you visited them before, there's probably a level of trust there and they also probably provide some amount of support after they sell it. So those could be better deals. You're probably not going to get scammed if you're actually walking into a store that has been there selling Macs for ten years.
Another way to save money is to be careful about what you buy. For instance you can buy a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro. So often I hear about people buying a MacBook Pro, which starts at $1600, when they could have done with a MacBook Air. Those start at $1100. Now if you've got the money that's fine. But if you're looking to save money a lot of times the MacBook Air is a better deal than the MacBook Pro or the Mac Mini is a better deal than the Mac Studio. So keep that in mind. If you're worried about something like, say, you're worried that a MacBook Air can't handle the photo editing you need to do or the screen isn't bright enough or something like that then try to visit an Apple Store or another retailer that's going to have them on display where you can try them. You can go into an Apple Store, walk up to a MacBook Air, maybe download a large image online, bring it into the Photos App, try applying some effects, try different things and see exactly how it looks on the screen and how well it works. This may help you feel more confident in buying the cheaper MacBook Air over the MacBook Pro.
Also, I've recently done a video on getting an external drive to save money on the high cost of an internal drive. Apple charges a premium for internal storage. While I certainly don't ever recommend getting the smallest amount of internal storage, in a lot of situations you can have a compromise and get the half a terabyte or one terabyte SSD from Apple and then get an external drive to supplement that. So check on my video on that and I myself use an external drive for archiving to save space on the internal drive allowing me to save a little money when I bought my Mac Studio.
Now there's no doubt about it that the bargain Mac is the Mac Mini. One of the reasons it is the cheapest Mac by far is it doesn't come with a screen, it doesn't come with a keyboard, and it doesn't come with a mouse or trackpad which allows you to save a lot of money if you already have all of those things. If you're simply upgrading your Mac and you want to keep using your keyboard and your mouse and you're already have a good display you can just get a new Mac Mini and that's it. You're not spending the money on the display like you are with an iMac or a MacBook. Even if you don't have any of those you can save money by buying non-Apple version. Certainly the Apple Studio display is a very expensive display. You can get a $300 4K display very easily and you can get keyboards and a mouse or a trackpad each for well under a $100 and save money versus the Apple product.
Also note that Apple accessories tend to be pretty expensive as well. So, for instance, here at the Apple site if I wanted to get a second charger for a MacBook, a common thing people want to do, you can see it's $59 for a new 70 watt USB-C power adapter which is what you may want and if you look on Amazon you'll find the same power adapter from Apple at the same price. But you'll also find adapters from other companies that are 70 watts or even more and those can be half the price or less. The same things goes for buying cables, you need some extra cables, you need some adapters things like that you can usually find them cheaper than what Apple sells. Even if Apple sells a third party one at their site usually it's a premium at the exact retail price. You're not going to find any sales or anything like that at the Apple store.
Now here's one that will only save you a little bit of money but you should definitely save it and it is easy to forget. Use your credit card to get those points. If you're like me and never carry a balance on your credit card the points are just free money. Now one of the best deals you can get is using Apple's own card. Since the Apple card is Apple's own card one of the things they do is offer 3% back when you buy from Apple. But there are other cards out there that will also offer 2, 3, or even more back when buying from anywhere and there are even sometimes special deals. Like one of my other cards sometimes offer special deals when buying from a store like Best Buy which, of course, sells Apple products. So buying with that card at the right time while a deal is available can actually get me a significant discount on that product.
Finally, let's talk about digital products. So when you buy something from Apple, like it could be music, it could be iCloud storage space or it could be an app, you get that product. But did you know you can most likely share that with your family. So Apple has family plans. For instance if you wanted to get Apple Music for your and say two other members of your family you can save significantly by using Family Sharing. The same thing when purchasing music and also drive space. You can share iCloud Drive Space with others. Plus a lot of apps allow family sharing as well. So you buy an app in the App Store whether it is for the iPhone or the Mac and everybody else in your family sharing group also gets to use that app. So checkout apple.com/family-sharing and you can read more about family sharing. How to enable it with your Apple ID and everybody else's Apple ID and set that up so you can save some money on digital products.
So there's some ways to save money when buying Apple Products. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Ways To Save Money When Buying Apple Products”

Sheldon

1 month ago

Thanks bunches

Richard Dickison

In the US military and retired military can also get a good discount. And, if they buy in the military exchanges, they don't have to pay sales tax.

Paul

Regarding military discounts, it helps if your military service is confirmed by "Verify Me" which then syncs seamlessly with the Apple Store. Using military exchanges also is an option, but there is limited opportunity to upgrade your purchase (e.g. added storage) that is possible when dealing directly with Apple.