There is an intermitted and basically unacknowleged memory leak in M1, which is supposedly addressed in M2. It also depends what app you're using - Logitech Options was somehow hogging top to 12gb on occasion, but was fixed sometime in the past few months.

So what you're saying is you're running multiple browsers (VS Code is a browser), each of which takes anywhere from 1 to several GB of memory, and you're surprised that you're running out of RAM...

Correct. I often have hundreds of browser tabs open on my iPhone, but it knows how to manage resources by unloading the ones I'm not looking at right now. The Mac can also swap tabs or apps to disk. Or warn me when I hit 90%. The only wrong option is to start freezing when it's too late. I'm a software developer who has been coding for decades, and I'm surprised by this failure mode. What would a random non-techie need to learn to reason about this? It's not like Macs are marketed only to technical professionals who keep an eye on resources.

Look, at least the Apple is smart enough to wake up basically in the same window state after having refreshed the resources. That's fantastic. But even better to fix it without going through the whole "have you turned it off and on again" routine.

> I often have hundreds of browser tabs open on my iPhone, but it knows how to manage resources by unloading the ones I'm not looking at right now. The Mac can also swap tabs or apps to disk.

Different models of computing. The iPhone only displays one tab inside one application at a time. And switching is slow enough that the OS can prefetch the swapped memory for the new view. A desktop app usually keeps everything alive as switching is very random and instantaneous. And you don't go open things that require a lot of RAM when you don't have that many (Each electron app is a whole new browser which is already a resource hog)

I've been using basic Windows laptops for work for many years now, and have never once had it ask me to start terminating applications.