I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.

Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop.

Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.

It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?

Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.

Honestly 128MB might be too much...

> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.

Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."

If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.

Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.

That's good info thanks and you are right I didn't take that into account. I do however think that 8GB may be basically usable now but I'd like to see students able to use these machines for a decent length of time and to be able to become digital creators using them. I get it won't edit video or do 3d modelling the same way a Macbook Pro can but it needs to do enough to get students interested.