It doesn't make sense for the system not to 'grab' a big chunk of your RAM. That is what it is there for. You want stuff to be preloaded into RAM so you can access it quickly if needed. You only want to leave some of it free so that if you launch a new application it has breathing room.

For example Chrome will scale the amount of RAM it reserves based on how much you have available.

> It doesn't make sense for the system not to 'grab' a big chunk of your RAM. That is what it is there for. You want stuff to be preloaded into RAM so you can access it quickly if needed. You only want to leave some of it free so that if you launch a new application it has breathing room.

Cache is excluded from just about any tool that shows RAM use, at least on desktops. If the ram shows as in use, the default assumption should be that it's in active use and/or wasted, not cache/preloading.

> For example Chrome will scale the amount of RAM it reserves based on how much you have available.

Which features are you thinking about that reserve ram, specifically? The only thing I can think of offhand that looks at your system memory is tab killing, and that feature is very bad at letting go of memory until it's already causing problems.

That seems like a hell of a lot of RAM for next to nothing.

I'm not a mac user but that seems ridiculous. I'd be investigating what's hogging it all.

I build my desktops with a lot of ram.

I have chrome, Firefox, photoshop, vs code, docker and a few other things running. As a kid I had to manage RAM. As an adult, I buy enough RAM to not need to think about it.

I was committed to buying an M1 on day one. I won’t buy a machine with only 16gb of RAM.

I'm the same, my current desktop has 32Gb, but still I'd be pretty concerned about 18Gb in use with nothing running.