Apple’s macOS Sequoia Can Boot To The Desktop On A System With Less Than 1GB RAM, But It Is Clear That The Operating System Is Heavily Reliant On The Swap File

wccftech.com:

This year’s latest operating system for compatible Macs, macOS Sequoia, which was released last month, arrives with a truckload of new features such as iPhone Mirroring, Passwords app, Window Tiling, and more. While these additions are nice to have, we believe that Apple does not get enough credit for making each of its platforms memory efficient, so its competition needs to get the same tasks done by incorporating more RAM. When running macOS Sequoia 15.1, an owner of what appears to be an extremely older Mac model shows that the machine can boot to the desktop with a laughable sub-1GB RAM. However, for obvious reasons, no one should attempt this.

Older Mac running macOS Sequoia 15.1 was only equipped with 768MB RAM, with the ‘Memory Pressure’ graph running in red

The exact model name of the Mac was not mentioned by @TheBobPony, but in the specifications section, the CPU is running at 2.86GHz and is supplemented by just 768MB RAM. How the individual managed to boot the operating system to the desktop is yet to be uncovered, but assuming the entire process was attempted the regular way that operating systems are installed, this is nothing short of impressive. Of course, it goes without saying that it makes little sense to attempt this, mainly when the entire RAM count would be utilized by macOS Sequoia all the time.

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In fact, the statistics at the bottom of the image show that the RAM is being swapped with the internal memory, as that usually happens when the physical memory count is too low. Out of 768MB RAM, 675.6MB is used up, and 137.8MB has been swapped. Apple also implements a memory compression algorithm in macOS Sequoia that helps reduce RAM consumption, but it can only do so much when working with less than the bare minimum. To remind you, Apple does not mention the hardware requirements for running macOS Sequoia and only lists the number of Macs