Buying Apple Hardware

Any tips out there on buying Apple hardware. We have been a PC only shop due to the limitation of legacy ACS ChMS but that’s changing. Our new Sr. Pastor prefers Macs, as to the design and presentation teams. Many of our pastors are best served by iPads/iPad Pros, but I don’t know where to start buying Apple products from a church/non-profit perspective.

I have enrolled some of our previous kiosk iPads in Jamf Now, if that helps guide any recommendations. I just know that with our partnership with Dell, we always get over 50% off list, which I’m not expecting from Apple, but something less than list is necessary to get Finance on board allowing the option.

Any insight would help! There probably is a CITN partner out there that I’m just not aware of.

Thanks!

Jonny

I would get a business rep with Apple and go from there. We buy everything from them and it auto enrolls in our Jamf instance which is very nice. The more you purchase with Apple the better your discount will be is what we have experienced.

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What Rob said. :slight_smile:

Plus… don’t be shy about Apple Refurbs. The majority of our church staff is Mac and the majority of those came from the refurb store… never been disappointed.

FWIW we also “self-insure” by skipping AppleCare… used to be easier to repair since we had an Apple certified repair person on staff which granted us a GSX account… alas, that ship seems to have sailed for most gear.

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I agree with Rob, get a Apple rep and you can set up a business web store. This lets you order online with all your non-profit details applying. The only problem I have with Apple products is that is something goes wrong with them, you have to take them to Apple to fix, while I can usually fix most PC hardware problems.

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I also agree with what Jeremy said, do not buy apple care in my opinion.

Your business account will get you enterprise phone support for free and they will quote repairs for out of warranty stuff over the phone and ship you a box for all laptops to send in for repair. We are 45 min away from the apple store so it’s a huge time saver for us to have any of the few issues repaired this way. We have over 70 apple devices and average less than 5 repairs of any kind a year past 3 years.

We buy direct from Apple using their business portal. Their price is the lowest, and their shipping is incredibly reasonable (usually free for standard shipping).

I would ask about Apple Business Manager (this is the easiest way to protect your devices ownership status), and skip AppleCare.

I would also recommend looking into an MDM (mobile device management) software if you don’t have one. We use Jamf Pro, but Mosyle is much cheaper and just as powerful.

Not so Bill. The web site https://www.ifixit.com has all the necessary instructions to fix just about any Apple device and I have done so for quite a number of years. You can also readily buy most of the parts you need online.

With regard to purchasing Apple hardware, you can go direct to Apple’s Education arm (they treat charitable institutions the same as schools as many schools have charitable status. Similarly, you can also go to a specialist Education Apple Authorised Reseller and get the same service. Here in the UK there are 3 that I use - Academia (www.academia.co.uk), GBM (www.gbmdt.co.uk) and KRCS (www.krcs.co.uk).

I have bought a lot directly from Apple Refurb. and haven’t had any issues and they offer same one year warranty. I don’t purchase Apple Care on laptops, and usually only purchase for our high production Worship Mac Pro/Imac computers. I find it is cheaper to pay out of pocket for couple of computers out of warranty or accidental damages a year, than purchase Apple Care. I think Apple give 5% discount on new after you spend $5000, and have to spend $25000 to get next tier which might be 6-8% if I am remembering correctly. With refurb., you can get 15-20% off latest machines starting with initial purchase. $1269 vs $1499 2019 Mac Book Pro, so $230 off https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/2019-macbook-pro

Love Ifixit, but newer ones are getting harder to work on with a lot more soldered or glued in parts.

@mhazelwood, do the Refurbs enroll in Apple Business Manager?

The latest Air units are MUCH more repair friendly.

Also consider smile.Amazon.com (Hope your church is your charity for amazon smile) iPad and Mac refurbs sold by Apple. Make sure if you are looking at another vendor besides Apple that they have stellar reviews. Get the 2 year old models refreshed or refurbed to save even more money than Apple direct if you don’t need the latest models. I have had very good success with 4 devices over the past couple years on Amazon.com. No repairs/ breaks or issues of any kind.

You’ve gotten a lot of good advice. I won’t repeat. I will add that we found a Mac Mini approach to desktop computers for the staff the best value (even with the recent price increase). To maximize that value we went with Asus MX monitors and Logitec keyboards. The Apple brand monitors and keyboards are very expensive and the keyboards fail a lot (keys go bad).

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