NEW MacBook Air M1 8gb 256gb: "your system has run out of application memory"

Just about daily, my new M1 MacBook Air starts to run warm (thought they were SO much cooler now) and then I get a popup to ForceQuit my applications with the message, "your system has run out of application memory" (and showing me that Safari is using the most memory by far). In fact, I checked the RAM usage and its showing 6.3gb out of 8gb. Im wondering is this simply a RAM issue and I should return/exchange for the 16gb model?

Funny enough, my 4 month older MBA 2020 never crashed like this (though it ran scorchingly hot which is why I bought the new M1 to replace it).

Only apps Im running when this happens are: WhatsApp, iMessages, Safari (with LastPass/Rakuten/Honey extensions). Safari has about 15 tabs open, which is nothing for my 10 year old iMac, or the prior MacBooks, so cant imagine its too taxing for this new M1 MacBook?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 30, 2020 10:30 PM

Top-ranking reply

piscies75

Level 1

8 points

Posted on Mar 20, 2021 7:42 AM

I had a mid 2014 MacBook Pro with soldered in 8 gb Ram, 512 gb HD storage. I was getting this same "your system is running out of application memory". I purchased the MacBook Air with 16 gb & 1 TB . I used my Time Machine back up of the 2014 MacBook Pro to migrate all my files and applications over to the new one. I then downloaded Big Sur.

I had seen so many videos on YouTube showing people running many programs and tabs in Safari. Almost immediately I got the error as above to my shock. I called Apple a few times but the best advise was from the first representative I spoke too. Re-install Big Sur without deleting everything.

It worked great and I have not had the problem again. I watch my Memory pressure on the Activity Monitor right now I am running PS, LR, Safari with ten tabs and Firefox with six tabs, Ibooks , iTunes , Messages, Calendar , Apple Mail and others and the memory pressure is low. Right now the Memory is 11.81 gb (out of 16 gb) and this machine is lightening fast. I use Topaz filters and they operate swiftly. I re-boot every few days and the initial memory is reduced to 6 gb. I am very happy with this machine. It still has a few bugs, my SpyderPro5 keeps saying it is not running but is. To get my Topaz and Nik plugins to work in PS I have to go through Bridge. Topaz customer service says they are working on fix and will have it shortly. Adobe also says they are working on fixes. Hope that helps.

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NEW MacBook Air M1 8gb 256gb: "your system has run out of application memory"

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