I have an M1 MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM and a 1 GB [10-Jul-2025 oops] 1 Terabyte hard drive. I really hope to upgrade to the latest MacBook later this year, if we sell our house and our money frees up.

The machine has been great, but recently has shown up some problems I attribute to having only around 300 GB free space, the low RAM and maybe some unknown factors.

In the 4.5 years I've owned this Mac, Apple Pay has worked approximately twice in spite of numerous attempts. It usually just silently fails. Apple Pay does work on my phone.

Recently I had problems with the Messages app silently quitting. That seems to have stopped now I've scoured my hard drive and increased free space from about 250 GB to just over 300 GB.

Now I suspect 8 GB RAM is insufficient (I always worried about that). Impressed by easily setting my iPhone to display random photos from my Photos Library as Wallpaper I tried to do the same on my Mac.

In short: grrr! After lots of attempts and failures, web searches for a solution, frustration, what I've done finally is to export a folder of 35 photos whose max dimension is the width of my screen, and point the Wallpapers to that folder. At last I have randomly displaying photos from my own collection.

I suspect this is a matter of RAM.

Anyway, first world problems …

I'm now much more careful about storing large files, or multiple photos of the same subject from the same photo session, and have taken to quitting apps that don't strictly need to be open all the time.

The former will be a good habit, I'm sure; the latter is just annoying.