It's not the price of a Mac Mini that I care about. I already have a Mac Mini. The thing is, my workstation is Ubuntu. I feel comfortable with it, all my tools

It's not the price of a Mac Mini that I care about. I already have a Mac Mini. The thing is, my workstation is Ubuntu. I feel comfortable with it, all my tools are here within reach, its setup is streamlined to get out of my way, etc... To develop for Windows or for iOS, I have to go out of my way and use another environment in which I don't feel comfortable. I don't get why Microsoft and Apple don't release cross-platform SDKs. I don't really care about XCode or Visual Studio, I just want a bunch of tools with which I can compile and publish projects from the command-line. Actually, I only care about publishing on my own personal phone and I don't really need an emulator either, as my own phone can substitute for that (provided it has a way to get some logs and stack-traces back). Apple makes this especially difficult, since you can't (legally) run OS X in a virtual machine (this was true last time I checked and the VMWare instance I managed to setup was extremely unstable). So that's why I brought up the OS X argument. Monetary cost is not the only cost. Google did a smart thing with Android, because even though you have to endure Eclipse, at least it doesn't pull you out of the environment you use daily. Also, developing with HTML and Javascript is even more kickass, because you can start mocking / messing around with just a browser like Chrome or Firefox with Firebug installed or something similar.