I've got ancient thinkpads (great machines), an old desktop, and an iPad Air1. I use a fair amount of linux here and there. I'm not wed to any platform for surfing, editing, writing, email, etc. I help support and maintain a lot of friends' machines that are Apple, and 100% of my interactions with the hardware and/or company have been successful, and relatively painless. Sometimes, even delightful. As a 40 year veteran of computers (back to punch cards), it's the best i've seen.
Still, hate it or not, Apple integration across a spectrum of devices is a big factor. I think only Google comes close, and they have some drawbacks.
So no... i would not consider a linux box to save a few bux. it's not what you pay, it's what it costs.
final note... linux updates too frequently for my tastes...an artifact of its dispersed development.
i've been doing ee/cs work for 40 years. i've lost count.
dead programmer/reverse engineering projects are in there, but not as common these days.
i did a bunch of rather amazing things in the rocket business for martin-marietta, raytheon, applied research associates.
once, i walked up to an employee who had been fighting a problem for two weeks, asked him what he was having an issue with, determined it was a variable initialization error, looked at his monitor, pointed to the missing # sign on an 8051 assembler listing and said, "it's right here". walked away... 60 seconds total. win.
another time... three engineers working on re-creating a poorly documented test station for a guidance section on a missile. again... two or three weeks spent trying to wake up an interface board based on a 68020 micro. they worked for me, and had sent an engineer to ask me what i'd do. i was busy, but took two pieces of test equipment down to the unit (a logic analyzer and a processor troubleshooter (Fluke 9010)), made them show me their failure. looked at what the processor was doing (nothing... just executing 00 op codes). inspected the memory to see where the real code lived. found it, but it was at the wrong address. burned an EPROM set with the code moved from 08000h to 000000h and installed them. problem solved. start to finish 2 hours. win. went back to my management stuff, which was making charts explaining schedule slips and cost overruns. these guys were hot shots. i smoked em. woot.
fixed a consumer product that was a serious design error. solved problem. product went on to sell several hundred million dollars of units, making the owner a very rich man and handing him 85% of his market. huge win.
i have at least one or two of these a year (though the last one is a bit more unusual because of the volumes involved.)
Note that they are looking for a beta site customer... lower right corner... next to the impressive list of folks who have validated cold fusion, which would be zero by my count. At least from places that don't feature folks with funny hats made of foil.
It's reaaaaaaaly hard to claim monopoly and restraint of trade when your are the highest priced thing in the market. The platform is also not locked down, in the sense that it can be jailbroken and apps (without QA or other oversight) can be bought, sought, installed and used. Yes, they have a commanding position in key areas of their markets, but plenty of folks are willing to pay a premium and plenty of other folks are willing to write apps under Apple guidelines and restrictions. There are too many ways to distinguish the Apple of today with the US Steel of yesterday. The problem is, the headstart grabbed by Apple isn't something any other single COMPANY (Android isn't a company) has been able to counter. This is all legit competition and it is lethal. Apple has just confiscated market participants formerly belonging to RIM, Nokia, MS, Dell, HP. Their stupidity is not legal grounds to oppose Apple's success.
There's more to it than the hardware and the OS.
I've got ancient thinkpads (great machines), an old desktop, and an iPad Air1. I use a fair amount of linux here and there. I'm not wed to any platform for surfing, editing, writing, email, etc. I help support and maintain a lot of friends' machines that are Apple, and 100% of my interactions with the hardware and/or company have been successful, and relatively painless. Sometimes, even delightful. As a 40 year veteran of computers (back to punch cards), it's the best i've seen.
Still, hate it or not, Apple integration across a spectrum of devices is a big factor. I think only Google comes close, and they have some drawbacks.
So no... i would not consider a linux box to save a few bux. it's not what you pay, it's what it costs.
final note... linux updates too frequently for my tastes...an artifact of its dispersed development.