Pages runs poorly and uses excessive RAM on M2 MacBook Air

Question

Pages runs poorly and uses excessive RAM on M2 MacBook Air

Hello,

Any idea why Pages runs poorly on my MBA (MacBookAir) but great on my much older iMac? I don't recall Pages being so poor when my MBA was using Sequoia, but don't have the system utilisation metrics to discuss here.

MBA: M2 8GB Pages 14.4 (7043.0.93) Tahoe 26.2

iMAC: 3 GHz 6-core Intel i5, 8GB, Sequoia 15.7.3.; exact same Pages version is on both machines.

Note I removed then reinstalled Pages from the App Store on the MBA in case something was corrupted, but that made no difference.

Occasionally, Pages seizes up on the MBA when trying to save documents and dramatically expands RAM usage from about 330MB to 2.5GB, necessitating a force Quit to take it down as it becomes unresponsive per the spinning pinwheel and Activity Monitor Status. Pages is entirely stable on my iMAC.

Even when working, the MBA Pages uses much more RAM. The following used exact same documents, from my iCloud drive.

From the Activity Monitor:

No Documents open: MBA uses: 231MB; iMAC uses 211 MB

3 text documents (on images, graphics, Numbers tables, etc - just vanilla text: MBA: 333MB; iMAC: 245MB

Thanks in Advance,

gA

MacBook Air (M2, 2023)

Posted on Jan 11, 2026 12:34 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,398 points

Jan 11, 2026 2:12 PM in response to gracelessAtom

Apple has not updated Pages v14.4 in over 9 months. That mean nothing has been done to ensure its full rebuild and compatibility with macOS Tahoe. With just 8GB RAM on your M2 Air, you will be severely limited in the remaining available RAM after the operating system takes its share.

You haven't mentioned it, but if you have installed any anti-virus or so-called "Apple cleaning" applications, these have been known to interfere with normal operating system and application behavior. They will also silently eat away at your already restricted RAM availability. These types of third-party products are entirely unnecessary and should be entirely removed per that vendors instructions.

Its not a fair comparision but I have Pages v14.4 installed on my 64 GB RAM M4 Mac Mini Pro and have never had any issues with it. I don't spend one second in Activity Monitor.

What I suggest you do is shut your M2 Air down ( not reboot). Follow the steps to boot your Apple Silicon M2 into Safe Boot mode. No third-party drivers are loaded in this mode, your font database will get rebuilt, and System caches will get cleared as it is booting. Now, press and hold the shift key while launching Pages. Open the same document as you did beforehand. Use Pages for awhile to see if it remains stable. If it does, that means something in normal boot mode is interfering with it. Now, reboot normally and launch only Pages again with that same document.

Fixed?

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Answer 2

MrHoffman

Level 10

146,155 points

Jan 11, 2026 2:43 PM in response to notlimey

notlimey wrote:

You're making me nervous... I have a MacBook Air M2 with 24gb of memory.... and no problems at all with Pages or any other app for that matter.

With three times the memory, your MacBook Air differs from the original posting.

I’ve long been a proponent of at least 16 GB with Apple silicon, and recent Apple Macs now ship with that minimally.

The original poster’s MacBook Air could also have added-on VPN apps, add-on security apps, add-on cleaner apps, or other issues.

Potentially also other heavyweight apps, including the Google apps, too.

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Answer 3

Jan 11, 2026 3:55 PM in response to notlimey

Pages on my MacBookAir with the minimal 8GB was fine under Sequoia - this didn't blow up until Tahoe - but of course, correlation (or coincidence) does not imply causality.

As long as RAM utilization remains below 80% (6.4GB used) system runs great.

It's just that when Pages goes unstable, its RAM utilization goes from about 300MB to about 2.5GB - about 8.3 times bloat. This never happens on my 8GB iMAC, same pages, or MacBookAir with Sequoia.

That's why I'm guessing it's more than RAM and suspect Tahoe.

Was probably separate issue, but corespotlightd was also going crazy, but then someone on this forum suggested rebuilding the search index that made a big improvement from almost unusable to great ... except this ongoing Pages RAM blow-up I still occasionally get.

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Answer 4

notlimey

Level 1

71 points

Jan 11, 2026 2:23 PM in response to gracelessAtom

You're making me nervous... I have a MacBook Air M2 with 24gb of memory.... and no problems at all with Pages or any other app for that matter.

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