
Not sure what app is chewing up RAM and slowing down your Mac? Activity Monitor, found in Applications > Utilities, is your go-to utility for seeing just how much RAM is being used or if one app is hogging all of the resources on your machine. Unfortunately, it seems like many of the low-RAM issues occur right at the time you least want to restart your computer! If that’s the case, try this next tip. Restarting your Mac empties RAM except for essential operating system functions, and also deletes any disk caches that have been created in order to free up RAM by moving information to disk storage. You know how that IT staff at your workplace always tells you to “restart your computer” when you have issues? There’s a reason for that: a lot of the time, a simple restart will resolve many issues. When you start experiencing the symptoms of “RAM cram”, here are some quick ways to free up memory and resolve the issues. The rest of us using productivity apps - Apple or Microsoft - should find 8 or 16GB to be plenty. Pro users often find that they need 32, 64, or even 128GB of RAM to run power-hungry photo and video editing apps.


Today’s apps love lots of RAM, so you may find yourself in a bind while running pro applications. One of the complaints about the new M1 Macs with their unified memory (built into the M1 system-on-chip) is that up to this point, it’s only possible to specify 8 or 16GB (gigabytes) of RAM. Having enough RAM (random access memory) in your Mac has been an issue since the days when the first Mac shipped with 128K (kilobytes!) of memory.
