Someone finally maxed out a Mac Pro... with 6000 Google Chrome tabs

2019 Mac Pro
2019 Mac Pro (Image credit: Rene Ritchie / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Youtuber/tech extraordinaire Jonathan Morrison has finally found a way to push the Mac Pro to the limit.
  • His weapon of choice? Google Chrome.
  • He opened up more than 6000 tabs, swallowing 1.5TB of RAM in the process.

Jonathan Morrison has finally done the unthinkable, maxing out the memory of a Mac Pro by opening 6000 tabs in Google Chrome.

Morrison has brought us plenty of joy these last couple of months, as he's put the Mac Pro through its paces. Not only has he managed to run 16K video playback using just one of its graphics cards, he also gave it a spin with two world-renowned music producers, who couldn't even make it break a sweat..

Now, however, the Mac Pro finally seems to have met its match in Google Chrome, which... we all should have seen coming really.

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In a hilarious Twitter thread yesterday, January 7, Morrison posted to show that Google Chrome was using up an obnoxious 75GB of RAM, which is more than most computers. Obviously, a lightbulb went off in his head, and he decided to keep opening tabs to see what would happen.

He posted to show he'd reached a landmark 2000 tabs, then again when he hit 3000. Up until that point, things were going well with Chrome only using a meager 126GB of RAM. Passing through 4000 and 5000 tabs, things seemed to be going well, as memory usage held steady at around 170GB. Then all of a sudden he hit 6000, and Chrome's memory usage skyrocketed to 857GB! At this point, Morrison said, "guys it's climbing rapidly computer might explode lol."

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His final tweet before everything went black just said "code red", and highlighted memory usage of 1,401.42GB, insane. Thankfully, Morrison has tweeted since, so it looks like he survived whatever explosion/fire is bound to have taken place shortly after. No word on his Mac Pro though. RIP.

Stephen Warwick
News Editor

Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore's latest breaking news regarding all of Apple's products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design.

Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwarwick9