outside of the technical and educational benefits they get, it also is makes them feel more welcomed in their community, and more willing to engage.
They're definitely making more than one step in the right direction.
OS X is also a sickly sweet gateway drug to living their iDevice lockdown lifestyle. They are continually doing things to lock down OS X with secret APIs that only Apple can use and that 95% you're talking about will one day figure out who Apple really is. I hope you enjoy being their sales-person until then!
However, I think they've done good for the *nix community. At it's simplest, the switch for a dev to go from mac to linux isn't as drastic as from windows to mac; much of that command line experience transfers over.
I think people will move away. I've already moved most of my dependencies to linux, and I've been a lifelong apple guy.
Why, just today i was trying to open up one of their keyboards and had to hunt around for a screwdriver that'll work, because they use security screws. Pretty much everything they do is anti-tinker and that's measurably holding back members of society from advancing our species; they seek to prevent the very same kind of conditions that permitted them to start apple in the first place; a pretty baffling behavior, least of all anti-social.
I have totally fallen out of love with apple nice to look at shit to use for profesionals.
I thought iDevices meant only iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch(es?).
Even if they switch...so what. They got a free computer and a chance to learn a lot. That's a pretty awesome head start.
I also hope that the library has some nice "here's why programming is awesome and here's the books that'll get you there" type of course set up :D
We've been doing "here's a linux distro on some old windows hardware" for literally decades now. It just won't catch on, especially in the age of mobile where people want less technical hassles, not more. A cheap/used android tablet with a BT keyboard is probably the low price leader here and will probably also keep someone from rushing to an idevice immediately. A $30 Chromecast turns your TV into a giant monitor as well.
You could try out one of these with a Bluetooth keyboard? They are somewhat sturdier than other tablets and have some OLPC-inspired software, plus whatever else for Android you can find. There are other Android kid-targeted tablets around, but they are all more expensive, afaik.
If you were struggling financially, which would you rather receive: a free, full featured computer, or advice on where to buy a cheap android tablet?
If anything, Android and ChromeOS are good examples common users don't care about GNU/Linux userland, rather a packaged experience. Which none of the distributions has been able to provide so far.
And yet, this is how I started when I was 12 years old. We had a 386SX-25 with 4MB RAM and a 40MB hard disk running DOS/Windows 3.11. I couldn't afford a commercial compiler, I got a magazine with Slackware 1.1.x, and installed it.
I took some years before I got further than writing some basic programs. But I read any documentation I could find (IIRC it had the TLDP HOWTOs on the CD-ROM), and not much later there was a Dutch book about Linux on the market. Halfway high school, I knew enough about networking and UNIX that I was paid to set up and maintain servers/firewalls, etc. at my school.
Sure, 90% of the people will probably buy an iDevice or Android tablet. But lets not forget that there are also tens of thousands (if not more) whose technical interest was ignited by installing Linux on an old Windows machine.
Me, I am still thankful to Pat Volkerding. I would probably be in a different place without his (and others') heroic work.