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Activity Monitor

Running tasks on E cores can use a third of the energy of P cores

Using a test of compressing a 1 GB file with AppleArchive, measurements of power used by core clusters show how efficient using the E cores really is.

May 3, 2022 Macs, Technology

Don’t trust Activity Monitor on M1 Macs

Using CPU % or Energy values in Activity Monitor appears to show that running code on E cores is less efficient than on P cores. Don’t believe a word of it.

May 2, 2022 Macs, Technology

Making sense of M1 memory use

How can you tell how much memory is being used by the GPU when both CPU and GPU use Unified Memory? Does it matter anyway?

March 1, 2022 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: CPU %

Current CPU % given in Activity Monitor can be misleading and has limited value for M1 models. Here’s how to improve it.

February 27, 2022 Macs, Technology

CPU percentage is misleading on M1 Macs

In Activity Monitor, % CPU isn’t on a scale of 0-100. In M1 Macs, it also makes no distinction between E and P cores, nor does it allow for their changing frequency.

February 24, 2022 Macs, Technology

Memory Lane: Grokking memory problems in Activity Monitor

T T Read More

Activity Monitor’s Memory view is the perfect place to watch for memory problems, such as a leak. Demonstrated here in macOS 12.0.1 and 12.1.

January 19, 2022 Macs, Technology

Solutions for macOS Monterey and Big Sur

From killing a process, through a regular restart, to Recovery and a bootable external recovery disk, all you need to know about fixing your Mac in macOS 11 and 12.

January 14, 2022 Macs, Technology

Explainer: Logging out and in

Is logging out and back in again a good way to deal with problems? Although it can be, it might not do what you think it does any more.

January 8, 2022 Macs, Technology

What to do when your Mac slows to a crawl

If your Mac slows to a crawl, don’t just reboot it. Here’s how to discover what the likely cause is, and a structured approach to recovery.

December 2, 2021 Macs, Technology

More memory leaks in Monterey 12.0.1: how to avoid them

Is Monterey burning your memory away? Here are two reproducible memory leaks which could explain that, plus two more than might.

November 22, 2021 Macs, Technology

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