"What is the difference between in the end and at the end?"
Michael Swan’s excellent Practical English Usage (Oxford University Press), provides a succinct answer to both of these questions:
"On time = at the planned time; neither late nor early:
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Peter wants the meeting to start exactly on time. |
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He would have died if they hadn’t got him to the hospital in time." |
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"In the end = finally, after a long time:
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In the end, I got a visa for Russia. |
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I think the film’s a bit weak at the end. p. 450 |
To see more examples of the use of these prepositional phrases,
see the Web Concordancer: http://www.edict.com.hk/concordance/
font: www.britishcouncil.org
