Is cached memory normal on a new Mac with no apps open?

ll728 wrote:

is this amount of cached memory normal?I just bought this Mac like few weeks ago and I have no application open.

Official Apple Support Community

Are you having an issue...? This is unclear.

if it ain't broke don't fix it

You can question a least a 1000 things about the macOS running as expected.

Caches are there to allow the Mac run more efficiently. There is no advantage clearing cache unless there is an issue.

Your memory pressure is low green I see no issue in your screen shot above.

If more RAM is needed or allocated— it will hand it off to the SSD as swap files. RAM is much faster

Caching files in RAM speeds up your Mac, because it does not have to go back to the source (your disk or the Internet) if the same file is referenced again.

Over time, Cached items are removed when space is needed. This is based on based on a least-recently used algorithm. The items that were referenced longest ago will be Purged first when more space in RAM is needed.

It is perfectly ordinary to see cached files still sitting in RAM. This makes your Mac faster. Once you exceed the available space in RAM, you will see far less caching of files, some compressed RAM, and swap used will increase.

We generally only get alarmed when the memory pressure stops being all green:

RAM that is completely idle is RAM that is not doing any work for you.

This is why macOS puts available RAM "to work" holding "Cached [pieces of] Files." If the Mac needs the data before it needs the RAM, that saves waiting for data to load from a SSD or an even slower hard drive. If, on the other hand, the Mac needs the RAM first, it can dump some of the cached data.

Swapping to "Compressed RAM" (instead of to the startup disk) is another optimization, based on the idea that modern CPUs are so fast that it makes sense to burn CPU cycles on compressing and decompressing data, to prevent the CPU from having to sit around idle waiting for data to arrive from a swap file on the startup drive.

Memory Pressure that is all Green, and Swap Used of 0 bytes, indicates that the memory system is not under any real stress at all. Even a relatively low Swap Used is OK as long as Memory Pressure stays Green.

Normal. Apple change dits memory management in 2013 to make better use of wasted unused RAM. This is the same report from my M4 Pro Macbook Pro 14 just now, with a lot of stuff running as I type:

Hi,

I think it's normal.