There is a lot of angry people, despising everything that even touched apple and let me tell you there is a lot of things I hate. For example you need second mac to reinstall os after breaking partitions no usb stick for recovery for you sucker. That said there is a lot of neat features that just work like apple tv box screen-sharing or using iphone as keyboard instead of dealing with arrow typing on remote, or when someone calls I can just respond on my laptop. To sum it up yes you can find cheaper device yes you can also find more performant device. What you won’t find is this walled garden of things that just work together. And for those angry people it’s okay that some people have different preferences than you have.

Totally biased, since I lived in half of my life in Skalitz. Have you considered KDC?

But what is recipe for spaghetti?