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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

> People uses Macs because they want to use Macs and software that takes advantage of the reliability and consistency of that ecosystem

ehhh. I think if you did some analytics of “apps Mac users use” an absolute ton would be “a web browser and very little else”. I can think of very few truly native Mac apps I depend upon and that keep me on the platform.

What does keep me on Macs is that every now and then I need to compile an iOS app. Apple give me no choice. Aside from that I’d say a lot of developers choose Macs because they’re the least worst POSIX platform, not because Mac native apps are a shining beacon on a hill.

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> What does keep me on Macs is that every now and then I need to compile an iOS app.

As a longtime Mac user, I really wish that Apple would make it possible to compile iOS apps on iPad. Not for myself, but for the developers who are only on the Mac for iOS development. I don't think it does anyone any good to force them to be in a place where they don't want to be. I have no ill will against iOS developers, but I also don't want them to transform the Mac into something non-Mac. Mac has always been a "niche" platform, and that's fine! Let the users who are here voluntarily stay, and let the users who are here only "by force" go to a platform that suits their needs better, perhaps iPad. If Xcode for iPad can facilitate that, I'm all in favor.

Just because you use non-native apps doesn't mean you like them. I mean, does anyone actually like Slack?

> I mean, does anyone actually like Slack?

Should I feel ashamed or something for saying yes? I hear all the bitching about how Electron is bloated, but I run Slack and VS Code all day and never have resource issues on my MBP.

No you dont have to be ashamed. If they run without any problems in your macbook pro then great. But they are massive resource hogs in my brother's PC where the RAM is limited to 8GB. Of course he complains that the slack app is quite heavy because he is not able to run a couple of other apps in parallel.

The solution we settled on is to run an android emulator and run slack and spotify in that. This restricts the usage to 500Mb and his PC is able to breathe a bit now

Slack on my computers with 4 workspaces is around 400-600mb of memory usage.

I like Slack and use it heavily. I'm signed in to 22 Slack instances in my current instance on my 2017 MBP.

So I like Slack, the chat platform? I don’t. Do I like Slack, the Mac app? Honestly it’s fine. My problem isn’t with the app, it’s the amount of attention I have to give it. Making it native wouldn’t improve that.

When I open Slack it takes a few seconds for the messages to come up.

When I open Mimestream (a new native gmail app), I see my messages in an instant.

That’s enough for me to dislike Slack.

I haven't really run into any issues with slack. It works quickly enough for what I need it to do and it doesn't use up enough resources for me to care about.

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