macOS 26 Tahoe: System runs out of application memory (M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD)

Dear community,

I recently bought myself a MacBook Pro with a M4 Pro chip, 48 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD hard drive.

It shipped with macOS 15.

After updating to macOS 26 I've experienced the following issues:

1) "Black screen of death" after system sleep

2) After wake up from sleep, I get the message "System has run out of application memory" and the system is completely unresponsive. (Can't check Activity Monitor for details because of that)

I have never experienced these issues with other Macs, and I am on my third Apple silicon machine now. I used the migration assistant to migrate the machine from my former M2 Pro machine.

Could this be a OS issue or is my new hardware faulty?

I attached a screenshot of the "application memory" message, but is in German.

Thank you, best regards

Michael

[Edited by Moderator]

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.0

Posted on Sep 30, 2025 1:02 AM

Top-ranking reply

neuroanatomist

Level 9

53,871 points

Posted on Sep 30, 2025 6:39 AM

See if the problem is present when you boot in safe mode, which disables 3rd party extensions and performs some system cleanup.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

FWIW, I have your configuration (16" M4 Pro MBP, 48 GB memory, 2 TB SSD). I'm running 26.0.1 (from this morning) and upgraded to Tahoe when it launched, and I've had no issues.

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37 replies

Oct 3, 2025 5:39 PM in response to iamshivam

Sorry, but there should be no way a 48GB MacBook Pro has this issue. A system with that horsepower should be able to handle pretty much anything and it is marketed as a power user machine. There is something wrong with Tahoe.

Oct 7, 2025 7:48 AM in response to iamshivam

Um - my device is shut down after every use, so it’s been restarted multiple times since this issue appears. Restarting has not been a solution.

I’ll TRY the Safe Boot, but I shouldn’t have to run my device that way just because of an upgrade.

Oct 7, 2025 5:19 PM in response to joyfromsan antonio

Is Apple even becoming aware of these issues? It's not like a Crash Reporter report is being sent in these cases. They must be aware, and this would definitely qualify as a priority issue.

I'll submit something through Feedback Assistant just in case.

Oct 8, 2025 10:14 AM in response to joyfromsan antonio

It is 100% an Apple OS issue. I thought how could this go wrong with full apple hardware. NIGHTMARE constantly running out of memory before the update it was extremely rare. Same work flow. This is an Apple cluster F. Stop telling people to restart or that this is some minor issue resolved with booting into safe mode please.

Oct 8, 2025 10:19 AM in response to curtisfromnovato

curtisfromnovato wrote:

It is 100% an Apple OS issue.

Yes, I'm sure that's it. Totally explains why I'm not having any problems with memory even with three image editing apps running concurrently. Must be macOS Tahoe that's the problem. Couldn't be an extension or 3rd party something else that you installed and I didn't.

Alex Kim

Level 1

149 points

Oct 10, 2025 6:58 AM in response to NoCreativeUserName

I've had this happen three times now. Twice this morning, with the second one happening only about 20m after I restarted the computer to clear the previous one.

This never happened on the previous OS, and I've had this Mac for for over a year (M3 MacBook Pro with 36GB memory)

Hope they fix this very soon...

Oct 5, 2025 3:44 AM in response to NoCreativeUserName

Might be unrelated, but it did just throw a “configd experienced a problem” error on top of the “out of memory” error.

macOS 26 Tahoe: System runs out of application memory (M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD)