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Contents
The Offer
As in previous years, Apple is running their holiday shopping event, from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, November 24 – 27. You can get an Apple gift card of up to $200 with select purchases from Apple.com:
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- Apple Watch
- Up to $50 with Apple Watch purchase
- iPhone
- Up to $75 with iPhone purchase
- Airpods
- Up to $75 with Airpods purchase
- iPad
- Up to $100 with iPad purchase
- Mac
- Up to $200 with Macbook or Mac mini purchase
- Accessories
- Up to $50 with select accessories: Apple TV, HomePod, Magic & Smart Keyboards, Apple Pencil, Beats brand products
- Apple Watch
Our Verdict
Though Apple direct purchases are often slightly more expensive than Apple products on Amazon (affiliate link) or other retailers, these holiday offers can sometimes make it worthwhile. That’s especially true if you pay on Apple.com with Apple gift cards purchased on some sort of deal or fuel points offer. You can also get free personalized engraving on some products when you buy directly from Apple.
Just remember that students and teachers can get an Education discount year-round on Apple products. This will not stack with the Black Friday gift card offer. (There are some products like iPhones and Airpods that never get any discount on the EDU site.)
Items can be returned through January 8th, with the current Apple Extended Return Policy.
Does not stack with military/education discounts.
If you can, wait until the back to school sale that starts in late June. That sale has a gift card discount that stacks with educational discounts.
Will this work through Chase points purchase?
Too bad it’s only on the older devices they are trying to dump. Hard pass.
Just a reminder to people trying to take advantage of this deal that most non-airline portals exclude most new Apple products from cashback. The one exception is Payce Rewards. More information in this post and its comments: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/which-shopping-portal-should-you-use-for-apple-purchases/
Does anyone know if this will allow for “price matching” for an item I bought earlier this month on apple.com? I bought a laptop for ~$2k and getting a $200 gift card would be nice.
15 day
This article has a table with more granular information about which model is getting which gift card (scroll down about halfway): https://www.macworld.com/article/672787/apple-black-friday.html
I wonder if I can pay with Apple gift cards cause I know that they usually don’t allow us to buy gift cards with gift cards
Yes, you can pay with Apple gift cards. I paid with Apple gift cards during the Back to School promotion, which similarly involved getting a gift card back.
Thank you for the DP!
Also, you typically can only purchase entry level mac computers from other retailers. Customized computers (memory >24GB, storage >1TB) can only be ordered new from Apple directly by consumers. For those, this type of deal are about as good as you can get besides getting refurbished from Apple or used from ebay or other marketplace.
How will they process if I return the product later?
They’ll return the price of the item minus the gift card value, and you will be stuck with a partial refund and a gift card. Essentially forcing you to buy the gift card at face value.
They process orders like Target – you’re technically paying full-price for the “free” gift card and paying a discounted price for the product itself. So when you return, you can only return the product for discounted price and the full-price gift card can’t be returned.
Hmm… I was planning on buying an iphone with UR points, I’ll wait to see if that still qualifies for this promo but I’m assuming it won’t. Terms state “Some method of payment types are not accepted under this offer. See checkout for details.”
This deal is if you buy directly from Apple. Using UR points is not buying through Apple AFAIK. But I’ve never used UR points for Apple products so not positive on that.
Best way is to buy apple gift cards using those UR Points .That’s what i did on my AMEX
Currently I would get 1.25x using the CSP at Apple instead of 1.1x buying the gift card. Even with the $75 gift card for buying an iphone 14, I think the math still favors using UR points directly. Plus, that extra gift card I would not count as cash equivalent, since there’s nothing else from Apple I need at the moment.