Day: October 11, 2025

• Apple offers teachers and students in grades K-12 discounted pricing on many of its products.
• Apple’s support of students and teachers dates back decades to shortly after its founding.
• The Apple Education Community offers educators access to online forums and tutorials at no charge.

From the early days of its founding, Apple has been devoted to helping students and educators by offering. Founded in 1976, by the end of that decade, the company was already donating hundreds of computers to schools, with donation numbers well into the thousands by the early 1980s.

In 1983, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs launched the company’s Kids Can’t Wait program that aimed to donate an Apple II computer, a monitor, a disk drive, and Apple software to every public elementary and high school in California that had at least 100 students.

The program was a short-lived, but it created lasting relationships between Apple and many schools — and entire school districts — and cemented the company’s commitment to supporting students and educators alike, a commitment that continues today.

Who qualifies for Apple’s education discount?

Students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and any teacher at a K-12 school, are eligible for Apple discounts under the Apple Education Pricing program.

Today, decades after Apple first lent support to teachers and students, that help continues, and largely in the form of reduced pricing.

Students can prove their eligibility for savings online at checkout by uploading scans of documents like a student ID or tuition bill. These items can also be shown in person at an Apple Store.

Teachers can prove their eligibility for Apple discounts with a school ID as well, or with a recent pay stub or letter of employment from a school. Homeschool teachers who have completed certification programs are also eligible for savings.

Products available to educators, students

Apple offers its discounts for teachers and students on a wide range of products. These include iPads, MacBooks, iMacs, and accessories, such as Apple pencils, keyboards, mice, and more.

Apple Watches and iPhones are usually not subject to educator or student discounts, nor are Apple TVs.

Along with discounted physical Apple products for teachers and students, some Apple services are also available at reduced prices. These include Apple Music, which is also available at a discount to students in colleges or universities.

Likely to prevent people from “straw buying” discounted computers or other expensive products for other people, Apple limits the number of products a student or teacher can buy at a discounted rate per year.

The limit is one discounted computer — a desktop or laptop both count — and two iPads. Two discounted accessories can also be purchased per year, and these limits apply whether a person is shopping online or at an Apple Store.

The Apple Education Community’s learning hub

The Apple Education Community is a completely free online platform that consists of a professional learning hub and a forum, both of which are designed for educators.

The learning hub includes myriad tutorials covering topics such as using Apple hardware (like MacBooks and iPads), classroom lesson ideas, and how-to programs that teach educators how to use Apple programs like Pages, iMovie, and GarageBand.

The Apple Education Community Forum is a collaborative space where teachers can connect with one another as well as with experts from Apple, getting help with anything from lesson planning ideas to Apple support with hardware they don’t know how to use sufficiently well.

The Forum allows educators to post questions, share ideas, seek or swap resources, and generally discuss teaching and learning with Apple products and platforms, all in the name of improving education, on Apple user, product, or platform at a time.

Their families came to America for different reasons: opportunity, education, safety. Decades later, some of their children — first-generation Americans — chose to go in the other direction.

I am one of them.

I was born in New York, the only member of my family with a US passport at the time. I grew up between America and Japan, and for the past 17 years, I’ve been living and raising my family in Singapore. My parents are from Argentina, though they were both first-generation Argentines: my father was born in Austria, and my mother’s family came from the UK.

So when someone asks where I’m from, I usually pause. Are they asking where I was born? Where I grew up? Where I live now? Or where my roots lie? Do they want the short version or the one that spans continents, cultures, and generations?

Over time, I’ve learned not to shrink that complexity into a sound bite. It has also made me more curious about how others navigate that same in-between space.

That curiosity led me to connect with other first-generation Americans who also chose to leave the US and return to the places their families had once left behind. The result is this collection of features, essays, and profiles about people who walked away from their parents’ dreams — and, in many ways, from the American Dream.

Last year, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas — a nonprofit that advocates for US citizens living abroad — estimated that 5.5 million Americans reside overseas. It’s a rough estimate based on international census data and doesn’t include military personnel stationed abroad. It’s unclear how many of them are first-generation Americans or how far back their family roots extend.

Some of these millions of Americans are chasing job opportunities, others a lower cost of living, or just a new adventure.

Lily Wu, now a compliance professional, was born in the US to Chinese parents who had come to study. She grew up in Boston and spent a lot of her childhood trying to be “fully American.” In her 20s, she moved to Hong Kong, reconnecting with a part of herself she felt had faded. “Now I find myself wanting to be more Chinese,” she said.

Catherine Shu’s parents were “shocked” when she told them she was giving up her dream publishing job in New York City and moving to Taipei. They had left Taiwan to pursue careers as architects in the US.

Ai Vuong, a filmmaker whose parents had immigrated to Texas from Vietnam through the Humanitarian Operation program, said her parents viewed Vietnam as a place they had escaped. But for her, it was a place she felt pulled to, a place she wanted to live.

Each of their stories reflects a familiar tension: between assimilation and belonging, between who we’re told to be and who we ultimately become.

Read on, and if any of these stories speak to you, or if you have your own story of relocation, working and living abroad, or walking away from the American dream, I’d love to hear from you at akarplus@businessinsider.com.