Question about RAM usage on silicon chips

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Your Mac is going to manage the RAM and reduce the footprint when needed and the more it has to work with the more will be used. Gone are the days when an application allocated a specific amount of RAM to use. All is good and not a problem.

If you use Activity Monitor to check your RAM usage, take a look at the Memory Pressure display at the bottom of the window. As long as the MP is in the green you have nothing to worry about.

Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor - Apple Support

As others have posted, the newer macOS uses RAM most efficiently.

All is well.

Besides the Memory Pressure graph noted by the others, the amount of Compressed Memory and Swap Used also play a part. More than likely on your old Mac, you were using several GBs of one or both where with the new laptop with more physical RAM you should not be using either.

snakenuts wrote:

OK, cheers. Just wondering why the usage spiked 4 gb from the previous MBA.

If you're running Tahoe on the M4 it is a more demanding version of macOS than earlier versions on the M1 especially if you enabled Apple AI. Your M1 was/is also limited by its 8GB RAM and it was probably using the SSD as swap memory leaving 1GB of actual RAM in reserve.

Plus, your M4 is actually using less RAM as a %-age of the total than your M1 was. Do the math. And it's probably not using any swap space.

The use of spare RAM for Cached Files predates Apple Silicon Macs and doesn’t have anything to do with Unified (“fused”) Memory.

It’s simply that if you use RAM in this way, the cache might sometimes offer a speedup (by saving a trip to a SSD or HDD). If it turns out that you need the RAM first, you can always dump the cached data (since it is, by definition, a copy of data that also exists elsewhere).

Completely free (“idle”) RAM is RAM that you know won’t be doing anything useful for you, while it is waiting to be allocated.

It’s better to have soare RAM than to have insufficient RAM, but there’s nothing saying that it’s good for all of that spare RAM to be idle.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. The OS manages RAM to improve speed so the more that is stored in RAM the faster the computer will run applications. Why would you not want the computer to use all available RAM?

No, it wont be a problem. The RAM is doing exactly what it is designed to do.