> 38G are in used caching things for applications The 38G isn't "cached app memory" (there is no such thing), it's actual resident memory, calculated as the su

> 38G are in used caching things for applications The 38G isn't "cached app memory" (there is no such thing), it's actual resident memory, calculated as the sum of the second column. The same as "RES" in Linux. There is no memory cache that differentiates apps from non-apps (whatever that is?), there is just regular file memory cache, which is labelled below the application memory section, shown to be using 13G. Every file you open on your system (read: app you open, file that macOS accesses, etc.) will be automatically read into the file cache and left there until some event, such as not having any unused memory since all of it is used as cache, requires some contents of the cache to be evicted to make room for an application. If this system had been low on RAM, this "Control Center" app would have been paging to disk to make room for the gigantic 26G it "needs" (the fact that it needs this much is a bug/leak. It should not be showing a number that high in that field, which is the resident memory required by the app.) In summary, unused memory is meant to be used for caching files (see https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/). The cache is lowest priority and almost considered "free" memory, in the sense that the cache can be evicted anytime to make room for actual application resident memory. In this case, "Control Center" is using 26G of resident memory, not cache (which is not shown in that column at all.) This is a bug/memory leak.