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Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak

Bought a 16” macbook pro m1 1TB 16GB recently, waited for these to come out. Then their was all apples hype how great they were with multi tasking. Truth be told my iphone handles memory better.

i got on chat with Apple they told me to restart in safe mode - worked for about 2hrs. Then your look on the web, loads of theories. Apple does not have any fixes for this. I went into a Apple store this evening asking about it, they say i must book a slot at the genius bar. I said are you not aware of the issue, there are literally loads of users experiencing the issue. I told them i am returning the device. At least tell your consumers what you are going to do about it. If Apple don't answer users question WTH is going on. Oh and here is the wierd thing, i went to 8 different new 2021 macbook devices presumably running all day some with various apps open, none of the had memory leakage having to use swap memory. So my question is, are there certain build that are ok and others not?

Posted on Dec 9, 2021 1:24 PM

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43 replies

Jan 11, 2022 4:59 AM in response to tyronne98

FIXED! I spoke w Apple support and they said I just needed to upgrade to newest Monterey 12.1 (21C52). Even though my Macbook 14 inch is brand new - and I didn't see an "Update" available in the software updates....I finally was able to see an update appear after waiting a few minutes at the Settings--> Software Update screen. The update was 3.2GB and took 15 minutes to download and install. Ever since software update, I am not seeing the "Out of memory" error popup. Yahooooo!

Jan 21, 2022 2:33 PM in response to DaSteinhoff

Yes, mine does that same. Some website, 20 minutes in on simple article will shoot up from a few hundred megabytes to close to 8gbs for a Macworld article! Then I get a notification within Safari about that page using "significant" resources for something so simple- a little article. Crazy. The Apple people even saw it. If the M1 is supposed to be so amazing, how come it can't have a simple website stay open, only 1 tab, without this memory issue? Its crazy. I have a m1 air with 16gbs of ram and 1tb. Apple told me basically told me I need to upgrade to monterey or FU; I told them I refuse and that its taken them a year to even get Big Sur right and they are creating shoddy operating systems. They didn't really like that. I told them i don't need any of the useless iOS iPhone features on the new OS and was happy with Big Sur (prior I had Catalina and was very happy with that OS).

I am wit you buddy!

Jan 29, 2022 1:45 PM in response to tyronne98

I support more than 100 macs and this issue has been driving me crazy. This is what I have found and how I have resolved the issue thus far.


  1. The only systems that I have had issues with are systems that have migrated users and applications from an Intel based mac. System with new users and freshly installed applications have had no issues for me
  2. I create a fold in the shared user profile named migration and copy all user data here.
  3. I create a new profile/user account
  4. Manually copy the data from the migration folder ie desktop, documents, etc
  5. Delete the original user profile


This has worked for me without fail thus far. I did not run the numbers, but I believe approx 20 percent of the intel to m1 migrations have had this issue. To avoid this going forward I am avoiding the migration assistant and just copying data and installing the software etc.


I have tested m1 to m1 migrations and so far I have not had any issue, I have not tested m1 to intel or had the need to do that as of yet.


I hope this helps and I hope this continues to work for me

Feb 1, 2022 8:00 AM in response to DaSteinhoff

Just an FYI, there is something fishy with that synonyme.woxikon.de site. It looks like it's a simple text search, but it was using 600MB+ and a ton of CPU on my windows machine too. It's likely some kind of hidden JS, I wouldn't be surprised if it's hijacking your browser to do something shady like mine crypto or like you mentioned, it contains ads & they might be abusing JS somehow. There were a bunch of obfuscated source entries too when I inspected it with Chrome Dev tools. I closed it immediately. I would not recommend using that site.

Feb 2, 2022 5:47 AM in response to tyronne98

I also share the same situation. I have an Macbook Air M1 8GB that worked perfectly when I bought it (Jan 2020), running the Big Sur. After I upgraded to Monterey (now version 12.1), the slowness and memory leaks are hapenning every day. I just opened the Mac, with Notes, Chrome (1 tab - this one I am writing right now), Slack, VS Code (in background, no projects running), WhatsApp desktop, Apple settings (updting to 12.2), and this is what the Monitor shows me: the memory is already full. I work with software development and I need much more than this apps to work the whole day. The Mac M1 was once the solution but it is now getting worse. I'm pretty sure this is a software issue, as I didn't have this problems with the BigSur version.

Feb 14, 2022 12:19 PM in response to tyronne98

I've had exactly the same problem and I'm just learning this is a flaw in their new M1 chip. I ordered a shiny new 24 inch iMac with 16 gig memory and set it up end it was barely functional from the get-go. Tech-support had me run first aid, reinstall the operating system, and still the problem persisted. One tech rep admitted this has been a common problem, then tried to convince me it was normal because "well you know, out of 16 gig, the OS itself uses four". I feel I have been sold a bill of goods and Apple is disingenuous and not telling people about this. Granted, if they did their stock prices would start to plummet. Maybe they should. Multiple tech-support calls several days later, I sent the computer back for a replacement. Now I am thinking I should just cancel it all together and shop elsewhere. If anyone has found a fix, I would love to hear it. Apple is not helpful.

Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak

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