Buy a qualifying Mac with your education discount and receive a $100 iTunes gift card that can be used on the App Store, iTunes store, iBookstore, and the Mac App Store. I understand why Apple decided to give away gift cards instead of iPods — Apple doesn’t need to push iPods anymore and would rather get people in the habit of buying on all of their stores — but, they’ve essentially cut the value of the promotion in half.

I was actually hoping that Apple would offer $200 off an iPad in this year’s promotion. The cost to Apple would be about the same as the free iPod touch but would feel like an amazing deal to people taking advantage of it.