Apple is giving education and business customers more incentives to join the Cult of Mac. Apple's Loyalty Program, which offers large discounts to repeat customers who spend thousands of dollars on Apple products, just got a huge upgrade.
Apple divides its loyalty program into three tiers based on how much you spend. Customers qualify for the first tier, red, when they spend more than $5,000 in one year on Apple products. The second tier, green, is for customers who spend more than $35,000 in one year. The last and third tier - blue - belongs to the few, the proud, the truly big spenders who buy more than $200,000 worth of Apple products in just one year.
The discounts apply to Macs, iPads, iPhones and specific accessories. Apple reportedly increased the discounts on all of these products by a few percentage points each. Mac discounts have been raised to six or eight percent, depending on which tier you are in, while third-party accessories discounts have been elevated to five or ten percent. Sadly, iPad discounts are still stuck in the two to four percent range. However, if you want to buy more than 50 of them, you can get a higher discount than you normally would.
The most exciting news about Apple's revisions to its loyalty program is the addition of the iPhone and Apple TV to the fold. Clearly, Apple wants to make the iPhone the go-to handset for business customers and the Apple TV the smart TV of choice for schools, universities and companies. Apple TV could be quite helpful during presentations, meetings, conferences and lectures. Now that Apple has learned to respect its TV business, rather than treating it like a hobby, it can really take off. Already Apple TV is very profitable and it is the fastest-growing business the company currently has.
IT professionals have been asking Apple to make its iPads, Macs and Apple TVs more business and education friendly with easy setup procedures and better discounts. It looks like Apple has been listening to its customers. The company has made several improvements to deployment and activation guides for iOS devices, in addition to these new great discounts.
It's a smart move for Apple, especially now that Google is honing in on education and business customers with its extremely cheap Chrome OS devices. Apple has its own little niche in both of those sectors, but it needs to stay competitive with Windows and Chrome in the classroom as well as the boardroom.
