this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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macOS still has the widgets 😉
They’re very nice and come in a bunch of different sizes. You can put them on the desktop or on the sidebar.
macOS has a pretty decent desktop/sidebar widget system.
As for the app, where I live, we get a lot of thunderstorms this time of year, so it’s nice to open up the app and get extended weather information once in a while because I don’t watch live TV, so I don’t get live weather reports from the news. The macOS weather app is very nice.
It’s also small and lightweight. I wouldn’t exactly call it “bloatwear”
Well, wasn't talking about Mac here, but the MS implementation.
And anything more than tens of megabytes for an icon on the taskbar is bloatware. It's not like pulling this data is hard.
Additionally, I get that same data in a few megabytes on my phone. Why the hell does a desktop app need multiple orders of magnitude more ram, even considering the difference in environment?
I agree. On macOS, the Weather app doesn’t run in the background. It’s a full desktop app. Desktop/sidebar weather widgets run in the background, but they only take about 25 MB total.
If you’re telling me that even the taskbar Weather app in Windows 11 takes almost a a gigabyte of RAM (or more??), that’s goddamn bananas.
247MB of RAM sure isn't my idea of lightweight.
It is always fun to compare system requirements for old software with new software.
The recommended amount of RAM to run the original Unreal Tournament game is 64MB.
Same goes for the original Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 game.
Indeed. 247 MB is four times as much RAM as is needed to use the full Adobe Premiere 6 video editor. And it is enough memory to run 30 instances of Word 97.
A weather app with images and backend querying can be made to run in ~20 MB RAM with proper optimalisation. The issue is that most developers don't optimize for memory use anymore. Things like data types, heap allocation and copies vs references used to be a primary concern of developers.
Using standards from 30 years ago is hardly a reasonable expectation
lol. Lmao even
Also, that’s why the widgets only take about 25 MB of memory. The Weather app in macOS does a lot more than just the very basics.
It's not an expectation, it's a reference. It's just a fact that software nowadays is not optimized for memory usage, regardless of the platform.
And yes, I'm pretty sure your weather app is fancy but come on man, a weather app is mostly a portal to show cloud data and is totally incomparable to a professional grade video editor, even one from 25 years ago.
The fact that you find it normal that displaying the weather takes up a quarter billion bytes of memory make me think you are relatively young and have never experienced anything other than the software of the past 10 years.
A 30 year-old reference used to rationalize a logically fallacious argument.
And whatever your opinion may be of my weather app, a video editor from 30 years ago is no longer “professional grade”. Oh, and 30 years ago, avid was the professional editing. Suite of choice, followed closely by da Vinci resolve and Final Cut. No professionals used premier. I know, because 30 years ago, I was editing video professionally.
You clearly have some axe to grind, otherwise you wouldn’t be here on a post about a Windows Weather app that uses five times as much RAM as a macOS weather app and still be whining about the macOS weather app, constantly shifting the goalposts 30 years into the past in order to do so, and having to make up stories about how “young” I must be just to rationalize your shitty attitude.
Take it from someone in their late 40s: grow up.
Why so emotional? We are talking about the memory usage of a weather app.
My point is about that 250 MB is a terrible amount of memory for such an application, and that such software isn't updated for memory regardless of the platform. Yes, the Windows one is the most terrible of all.
The fact that you are a video editor is not relevant, nor is the fact that you are older, but it is interesting to read about your past nonetheless. L
lol, you're the one throwing a tantrum over a weather app, using logical fallacies and insults to do so. what a joke.
go touch some grass kid. you're blocked.
Well, I apologize if saying that the remark about you being inexperienced triggered you. Though I must say your first reaction, literally laughing out loud at my contribution is also not the pinnacle of empathy.
This topic is about memory usage so let's stick to that. And blocking is up to you, as it affects your experience and not mine.
Considering everything it’s doing? That’s nothing. And the widget only uses 25 MB.
But keep shifting those goalposts…
Care to elaborate on what goalpost I've shifted? You said it was lightweight, I didn't agree as I feel like 247MB is far too much for showing a weather forecast that was computed elsewhere.
It has been my experience that one cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
Very educational and not at all what I asked for. Thank you.
We learn by doing