January 2022 • Macworld 31Gregory McFadden (@
GregoryMcFadden) October 28, 2021
I now keep Activity Monitor open
while I work and it’s rare that the
memory pressure monitor isn’t yellow
or red. Like most Mac users, I tend
to keep several apps idling in the
background – Mail, Music, Safari,
Outlook, Word, and so on – but with
the M1 MacBook, I often need to quit
apps to free up application memory.
Closing Safari tabs is a regular task
necessary to free up memory and
keep my machine running smoothly.
That’s extremely similar to the
MacBook Pro and Monterey issues
I’ve read recently – except I’m still
running Big Sur. That leads me to
believe it’s a bigger problem that
wasn’t as widely reported until
now. Perhaps
it’s because
developers tend
to be more hyper-
aware of things
like this or it’s
exacerbated by
the extra RAM in
the new MacBook
Pro, but the
number of people
experiencing this
issue appears
to be growing. And I hope Apple is
paying attention.MEMORY LOSS
When the M1 chip was released, Apple
changed the way we think of RAM on
our Macs. As in the iPhone and iPad,
the memory was now affixed on the
same package as the system-on-chip.
The M1 Pro and M1 Max come with
higher memory options, but the M1
tops out at 16GB and that’s that.
As Jason Snell wrote back when
the M1 was released, that tidy system
has benefits: “The M1 processor’s
memory is a single pool that’s
accessible by any portion of the
processor. If the system needs more
memory for graphics, it can allocate
that. If it needs more memory for
the Neural Engine, likewise. EvenWarnings like these – which I received while I was writing this
article – are common.