M1-Powered MacBook Pros Seeing Serious Memory Leak Issues

Some users are reporting that Apple’s new M1-powered MacBook Pros are seeing a serious memory leak issue.

Apple’s latest M1 Pro and M1 Max-powered MacBooks have certainly impressed both longtime and diehard fans, particularly with the performance gains and efficiency of its SoC, as well as a whopping 64GB of Unified Memory, compared to using a dedicated CPU and GPU.

But, as the rule of Murphy’s Law usually goes, the new MacBooks aren’t without their own set of issues, such as a massive memory leak.

In the case of Gregory McFadden, he discovered that his new M1-powered MacBook’s Unified Memory was relegating a good chunk of itself to the OS Control Center, explains a new report from Macworld. Control Center was using 26GB of the Unified Memory which is, suffice to say, way more than the program actually requires.

Michael Simon of Macworld chimed in with his own experiences and how this issue often leaves his original M1 MacBook in an unusable state. And, thanks to his article, more and more people are sharing their experiences with the same issues with their Apple MacBooks based on the M1 series of chips.

A memory leak is a resource leak that is basically representative of mishandling app instructions that can cause a program to fail to let go of unneeded memory space. This often results in a single program arbitrarily taking up more memory resources than it should, at which point the amount allocated to it grows until either the program crashes or the system runs out of memory entirely. At that point, your whole system could either become completely unresponsive and a reboot is likely the best course of action from there.

This memory leak issue should be something that Apple can get sorted, hopefully in short order. After all, Apple’s new shared memory architecture is part of the reason why its new Apple Silicon offerings are so performant.

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