If you compose music on a computer, you almost certainly still do it with MIDI. All the new highly advanced synths and samplers still use MIDI as their input for data. Everything from big dollar stuff like Native Instruments Komplete down to freeware. MIDI goes in, sound comes out.

In some ways it surprises me since you'd think they would get around to improving it (there are some things MIDI leaves to be desired) but on the other hand it does work well for nearly everything and there's something to be said about keeping things standard. You can literally take one of those old General MIDI songs and feed the data in to a modern sampler. I do just that all the time to remake old game soundtracks because I enjoy it.

Unless you're Apple, iOS and OSX are not an option.

Per the last stats I saw, home ownership in CA is actually higher than average. A great many hovels are owner-occupied, especially in the rural areas. And there's an astonishing lot of CA that still doesn't have electric service, including well-populated canyons -- some within 15 miles of Los Angeles.

Canyons get started by water, but it doesn't take much -- just enough of a ditch to generate a bit of wind. Windblown sand does the major carving after that.

Yes, and if you want examples of low voltage DC, you can look at the RV industry. Having recently bought a tiny RV wired in 12V, I saw how difficult it is to find, not equipment, but quality equipment for it. Power devices like hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, etc, simply don't work well. Not enough power.

"Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers always wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of a machine room." -- Real programmers don't write specs

Ahem, so, do you climb in those parts ? I'm not very far...

So you're not privvy to what goes on upstairs. Go find somebody in the know, get them drunk, and ask them about massive scaling and Google's patents on map/reduce.

In the meantime this seems like a good idiological fit. The surveillance-funded corporations will be taken care of while the USG destroys the software industry, which is too wildly successful for a completely unregulated market. Nimble big-name companies have already fled or are in the process of fleeing the jurisdiction, leaving work-a-day programmers to manage the leavings or find a different line of work.

If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.

Re: China. iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters. And China is a special case - Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there. Apple cooperates so they can sell iOS as is, getting a built-in advantage. Despite this, Android still dominates.