Windows 11’s Weather app uses 5x more RAM than macOS. That’s over 1GB
An analysis found Windows 11's Weather app runs like a browser, consuming far more RAM than its macOS counterpart. Credit: Joel Lee / Foundry It’s long been known that Windows 11 requires unusually large amounts of memory to function, and it’s been one of the most consistent criticisms of the operating system. The built-in Weather app serves as a prime example of just how much of a memory hog Windows 11 has become.
- ▪An analysis found Windows 11's Weather app runs like a browser, consuming far more RAM than its macOS counterpart.
- ▪Credit: Joel Lee / Foundry It’s long been known that Windows 11 requires unusually large amounts of memory to function, and it’s been one of the most consistent criticisms of the operating system.
- ▪The built-in Weather app serves as a prime example of just how much of a memory hog Windows 11 has become.
5 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 33 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Windows 11's built-in weather app hogs more than 1.2 gigabytes of RAM just to tell the forecast — memory-sucking web wrapper filled with ads masquerades as an actual application — Tom's Hardware
- ▪ Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM — Notebookcheck
- ▪ Windows 11’s Weather app uses 5x the RAM of macOS Weather, and it still shows ads — /r/Technology
- ▪ Windows 11's Weather app reportedly uses 5x more RAM than macOS's Weather app, with ads to boot — XDA Developers
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| Original publisher | PCWorld |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcworld.com/article/3209583/windows-11s-weather-app-uses-5x-more-ram-than-macos-thats-over-1gb.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:25:20 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T15:30:47.861Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T15:30:47.861Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TOcWia9Y755P · 5 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An analysis found Windows 11's Weather app runs like a browser, consuming far more RAM than its macOS counterpart. Credit: Joel Lee / Foundry It’s long been known that Windows 11 requires unusually large amounts of memory to function, and it’s been one of the most consistent criticisms of the operating system. The built-in Weather app serves as a prime example of just how much of a memory hog Windows 11 has become. The Weather app is conceptually simple, displaying weather data provided by MSN and its various sources. Pulling data and mocking it up in a visually pleasing way for users isn’t rocket science, and there’s no reason why an app like Weather should involve any complex programming.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCWorld.
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