In the case of one Gregory McFadden, they discovered that their new M1-powered MacBook’s Unified Memory was relegating a good chunk of itself to the OS’ Control Centre. Like, 26GB of the Unified Memory which is, suffice to say, way more than the program actually requires.
— Gregory McFadden (@GregoryMcFadden) October 28, 2021 For the uninitiated, a memory leak is what happens when a resource is unable to properly allocate or distribute the necessary amount of memory to a specific program. Typically, such as problem is usually reflected in a program taking up more memory than it actually needs. Such an issue can usually lead to the system becoming slow and at worst, unresponsive. Unsurprisingly, McFadden wasn’t the only one who was facing memory leak issues with their new MacBook. One user replied to his tweet with a screenshot, showing Google Chrome hoarding a little more than 21GB of memory, although to be fair, the web browser itself is notorious for consuming mass amounts of memory, even with non-Apple devices.
— Fernando Belmonte (@fjbelmonte) November 3, 2021 Another user also replied to McFadden’s tweet, who suffered from the same memory issue with their Control Centre, the punchline being that the amount of memory being allocated far exceeded the MacBook’s Unified Memory Amount: 75GB. (Source: Twitter [1] [2])
