Apple’s latest macOS release, Tahoe 26.0.1, is drawing heat after users watched basic apps consume eye-popping amounts of memory. One MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM showed Calculator at 42.31 GB in the Force Quit window. Another screenshot captured Pages swelling to 175.41 GB before the system threw an out-of-application-memory alert. Chrome sat paused at just over a gigabyte while the system crawled. The pattern points to something deeper than a single misbehaving app.
What people are seeing
Reports describe sudden slowdowns, spinning beachballs, and the Force Quit panel blaming a single Apple app. The app varies. Some see Calculator spike. Others cite Pages, Messages, Finder, or even Photoshop and Safari after long idle periods. Quitting the app clears the pressure, but the leak often returns over time.
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Several users who upgraded machines with 8 GB of unified memory say Tahoe exaggerated the problem. One commenter advised avoiding the update on low-RAM Macs. Another noted that earlier macOS versions felt steadier on the same hardware.
Why this looks systemic
The scatter of affected apps suggests a common dependency rather than isolated bugs. Multiple commenters argue a shared system component is leaking memory. They point to areas like message passing or the windowing and UI stack that all apps touch. Some speculate the new visual treatment in Tahoe, marketed as Liquid Glass, could be part of the trigger as we have seen such memory leaks after the OS 26 Updates. That remains unproven, but the cross-app symptoms fit a framework-level fault more than a single executable gone wrong.
What helps right now
If you hit the wall, these short-term steps reduce pain:
- Force quit the runaway app, then relaunch it.
- Restart the Mac with “Reopen windows” unchecked.
- Watch Memory Pressure in Activity Monitor. If pressure climbs while an app sits idle, treat it as a leak and restart it.
- For long Pages sessions, avoid pasting giant clipboard images, temporarily hide Page Thumbnails in very long documents, and pause iCloud collaboration if spikes follow shared edits.
- Capture a “Sample Process” in Activity Monitor and file it via Feedback Assistant to give Apple concrete data.
- Advanced only: test a hidden preference to switch off a SwiftUI compositor path with
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES - Revert with:
defaults delete -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium. Use at your own risk.
Two recent threads on r/MacOS, with screenshots showing Calculator using 42.31 GB and Pages peaking at 175.41 GB on macOS Tahoe 26.0.1, informed this report. The images indicate the affected Mac was a MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB of memory.
Tahoe appears to leak memory in a shared layer, and everyday apps end up wearing the blame. Until Apple ships a fix, quick restarts, lighter sessions, and detailed bug reports are the best tools you have.
M5 Max with 128BG still getting the same problem.
I had the same problem on macOS 26.2 25C56 this morning, on a Macbook Air M1.
I’d never had this problem before.
I have an M1 with 16GB of RAM and it’s also very sluggish trying to do basic things.
Same here.
I changed some settings, and it seems to have helped a little.
– Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency Checked
– Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion
Same here. Even after 26.1 (on MBP M1 8gb)