Ahhh… Machines with upgradable RAM.
There’s hope yet as it looks like the EU is pushing a right to repair law and while Apple is doing everything in its power to stop it in the US, if gets passed in the EU, it will only strengthen it passing in the U.S.
Right to repair probably wont impact a choice like Apples where the RAM is all ON the same CPU die
I’d be surprised if that actually came out of this
But making it illegal for companies to void warranties if you crack open the case just plain makes sense
Where I live this problem exists on a much bigger scale (literally)
Folks around here buy a new tractor and if it breaks down or something they cant just fix it themselves any more. So they are down until such time as the Deere dealer can send out a repair guy with a “certified Deere part” that the tractor actually detects (yes seriously) instead of an aftermarket part etc that the tractor also detects and refuses to work
When you pay 600 - 700,000 for one of these monsters thats just a kick in the teeth
So just imagine how much money one saves with a 10+ years old computer 
Writing this on a 2008 Mac Pro running Mojave.
As an aside, I am having a problem updating apps from the app store on my “Late 2013 Mac Pro” running Mojave. All Apple wants me to do is to upgrade to BS.
Sadly, I am seeing more and more occurrences of a situation like yours.
I mean I hear the conspiracy theories that Apple have allowed this to happen to “force” users to upgrade, and in your case, buy a whole new Mac… I just can’t think that if this is true, that they’d get away with it, especially when being scrutinized by many countries.
But the evidence is there.
Sorry Man.
I can recommend https://www.corecode.io/macupdater/. In case of an App Store App Update, it will bring you straight to the Apps Page in the Store, from where you can also start the Update.
Disable checking for Updates completely and use https://www.corecode.io/macupdater/ for App Updates? 
My first-gen MBP is still around, in good order, for when I just have to get my Snow Leopard fix. 
It all looked so good when I had the developer Beta running in Parallels. Turned out Big Sur is my personal Crappolina.
My Retina iMac experiences frequent slowdowns since the upgrade. Every now and then (varying between just a few seconds and something like 20 minutes), the Mac simply pauses, just showing the spinning mouse cursor, and will resume operation several seconds, sometimes more than a minute later.
Even worse: A few times a day it will not recover from its sudden meditation and either hang completely, restart or shut down.
The exception report will mostly say something about a watchdog process misbehaving.
I found some reddit threads about similar problems, but no solution yet. Cleaned caches and all that stuff (waiting about two hours for Onyx to finish the tile structure scan), and while it first looked like the problem had been resolved, I was only lucky for about half an hour until the freezes returned.
Don’t ask me how much fun work is currently. Especially combined with Xojo still not being able to recover project changes after a crash.
I had this problem back in 10.11 and I first thought the machine was hosed. After more diagnosis I found it was because I was using nearly 64GB of RAM on a machine with only 16GB.
A clean install and migration from Time Machine, really helped.
I also had terrible memory problems with my first 16" MBP (32GB) running 10.15.3. When I got my second one (months later) I did a clean install and manual migration and now it barely uses more than 8GB at a time.
So there’s some bad coding in the OS for memory management, that might be triggered by who knows what that the Migration Assistant (which is used when upgrading) gets wrong (and it gets a lot wrong, so much so that Apple Care advise customers NOT to use it).
Under the first betas I had similar problems. At least once a day the MacBook Air first got loud and then froze. One beta (3 or 4?) didn’t take and I had to restart the computer. This killed the logic board.
The replacement Air was quite okay on Catalina. After updating to BS the Air is way louder than before. But the computer doesn’t freeze anymore. Just reading German newsmagazine Spiegel isn’t possible anymore with Safari. Both Apple and Spiegel don’t care.
Thanks, Sam! You could be spot on.
If I interprete the graphic correctly, my system starts to swap and compress memory when 16 of the 32 Gigs are full. Hardware check says everything is fine.
I have the feeling the next day will be soo much fun … 
Dropped Safari years ago when it became clear that FireFox was the faster browser (even if it’s weird). Tried Safari again with Big Sur and nope, FF is not only faster, but I couldn’t get Netflix to work in Safari and see others still can’t get it to work with 11.1.
I always remove Safari from the apps bar and put FF there… and Chrome, because some dev tasks are better done with Chrome (better integration with some external tools).
Dropped reading Spiegel when it became clear that they did not care for journalism anymore. 
(Sorry, could not resist)
But seriously: It’s ugly and has debatable content, but aside from that I can still access Spiegel with Safari under Big Sur. Sure there isn’t something else ruining your access, @beatrixwillius?
The Fake News Newspaper ? (Remember the Hitler Books forgery…)
The Mirror, on Monday, says Fench border will reopen. Two days later, it start to be opened…
I don’t want to start something on fake news. I know that journalism isn’t what it was. Spiegel is one part of the news I read.
But yes, I see the problems every time I read Spiegel on BS. The old Air from 2017 got hot, loud and then froze. The new one gets hot and loud with Spiegel. Every time I tried I got the same result after opening a couple of tabs. Then I gave up.
My Air is used for email, reading, making fractals and the occasional testing with Xojo.
@ubogun: what computer do you use?
Me neither, Beatrix.
I do inform from several sites too in trying to get a somewhat balanced view.
Just checked it again with my Retina iMac late 2014 and except for some short daemon peaks and the problems described above and OTF the system is idling along at 3% CPU usage with about 20 Safari tabs including Spiegel open.
I should add that I do use some Safari extensions to get rid of pesky ads. (You cannot read the once well-reputed tagesspiegel anymore on a mobile without getting the idea of being on a shopping site). Maybe here’s the difference?
No, that was Stern. Spiegel had its own scandals, one of them finding the stories of a highly awarded reporter being rather completely fictional novels in reality.
Thank you for the error correction.
Ha! Never heard of that “Spiegel”… I thought you meant the Spiegel Catalog (used to get it around the same time as the Sears & Roebucks catalog (both from a bygone era)
