I'll ignore the "obnoxious" and "Get off your high horse" comments. Despite your tone I think you have a good point that's worth addressing.

> Luckily the users can decide for themselves what is unethical or not. ... They have provided me with some fantastic value. Is it great that they take up ~100MB of memory each? No but it's not even close to as big of a problem as some devs try to make it out to be.

Right now I have Slack running on my Mac. The Slack processes and memory usage are:

* Slack Helper (Renderer): 384.5 MB

* Slack Helper (Renderer): 168.4 MB

* Slack: 134.2MB

That's a sum total of 687.1MB for a chat client.

Now, my memory resources are limited. Sure, I have virtual memory etc etc, but there are costs using anything paged out. Importantly, there are apps that I want to have memory available for: multiple virtual machines where taking several gigabytes is expected and a _good_ use of memory; image editors that genuinely require a lot of RAM. The key here is (a) resources are finite; (b) some apps genuinely need memory; (c) some apps are valued (by the user) in terms of memory higher than others. My machine is for me to use, not a third party to misuse or squander.

So why should I be happy with 687.1MB of _my_ memory used by a chat client, when a competent development team writing a native app could use a fraction of that and give me a better native user experience?

One point you may not have realised is that yes, memory has grown and is cheap, but the advantage of having more resources is to do more. I'll repeat that: _having more resources should allow us to do more_. Imagine that an app on my modern Nvidia graphics card with, say, 8GB of RAM used all that RAM and GPU power to achieve the graphics from my Riva TNT from 1999. Would you expect me to be happy with that, or would you expect me to not be impressed by the graphics apps using that card?

More, while memory is cheap for us, and many HN readers can probably drop thousands of USD on a new 16 or 32GB latest-model MBP, not everyone can. Many people use old computers, cheap computers, ones that cost $300 and come with 3GB of RAM and a 32-bit copy of Windows. Or they're using their laptop from 2011, because it still runs and money doesn't flow. They use those as best they can. And it's... privileged? I can't quite find the word, but I think we as developers should write our apps for them too.

There is also the matter of professional pride or self-respect. Could I, as a developer, be satisfied and feel I was doing a good job with my work on Slack? Did I "do it right", can I be proud of my work? Maybe, because it's useful and polished, but to feel I'd done a good job I'd have to have a very different set of values in terms of how I thought of my customers.

I use Slack because it's a team tool and they got to market with a cross-platform app early and/or with good marketing, and are now the default. Years later, they still use the same client. Someone in Slack HQ has made the decision that the improved user experience and respect for their user's resources is not worth the financial and support cost of developing a macOS native client. That's their prerogative, but you shouldn't expect me to like it. I'd have a lot more respect for Slack and Slack development (or management) team if they produced an app that 'Did It Right', that was built on the principle that the machine Slack runs on belongs to their customer, not to them.