I do beta testing for SCSC who develops Scannerz, and with that product they include a product named Performance Probe. Unlike the current implementation of Activity Monitor, it STILL shows actual memory consumption in real time.
I've often thought that the changes in Activity Monitor to memory reporting and usage that came about in Mavericks were done to hide how inefficient the operating system has become, or, if we want to be really, really, cynical, part of a scheme dreamed up by Apple's marketing team to trick people into thinking they need new systems or more memory all of which are quite expensive if purchased at Apple.
If I understand it right, something called speculative memory, which is memory not in use but that might be used is now in the "used" memory classification. That now gets added to active, inactive, and wired and it always reports that nearly 100% of the memory is used. The only way you can get a handle on which program is using how much memory if you're not using something like Performance Probe is to open up Activity Monitor and look at the process list, sort by memory, etc. It's quite annoying,.
The way Activity Monitor reports memory graphically simply makes no sense, unless the objective is to misrepresent or hide something from the user. That's not a Yosemite only problem though...that one started with Mavericks.
Now for another example of the "we're too stupid to be alive" design team at Apple take a look at this "improvement":
- Open up the side bar in Safari in an OS earlier than Yosemite. Notice the icons and how they correlate to the site being linked.
- Now open up Yosemite and do the same. It's all the exact same icon for every entry. You can't easily find anything.
First, what's a good name for the open book icon? How about "stick figure icons" because they're drawn like infantile stick figures and they're now throughout iOS and OS X now as well.
But what is the logic? I can do this on Mavericks and I can quickly see an icon for the weather channel, icons for TV stations, icons for this, icons for that, and I can quickly find what I'm looking for and select it. With Yosemite I have a long list of the exact same open book stick figure icons for every single item, and unless the list is very, very short, like 5 to 10 entries, it's nearly impossible to navigate.
What's the logic???? How is this possibly an improvement? The Safari side bar has basically been rendered utterly useless. There's literally no point in having it or using it.
This company literally has no clue any longer.