Despite what you’ve read, 2026 has been a good year for Windows 11, and the 26H2 update about to land on everyone’s system is, dare I say, a real cause for celebration. Refinements and customization for Explorer, Taskbar, Search, and the Start Menu go far beyond visual changes, delivering meaningful updates to the OS for speed and responsiveness that speak for themselves.
So, why then, is it continually Windows 11 first-party apps that feel like a neglected problem dragging down the rest of the Windows 11 experience?
Windows 11’s real memory hog isn’t the shell; it’s the built-in apps
Why does the Weather app need 1GB RAM?
Windows 11’s GUI gets blamed for the OS’s high resource consumption, but that is far from the truth. The biggest culprit behind Windows 11’s resource intensity is the pre-installed apps. You can try to de-bloat by removing or disabling these first-party apps, but some are integral to the Windows 11 experience and unavoidable.
The biggest cause of their resource hogging is that they’re built on technologies like WebView2. That essentially means they’re web wrappers, so you’re running a browser in a native app shell.
This is why you’ll see Windows 11 apps consuming more than 500 MB of RAM on their own, and in some cases the Weather app alone hogs more than 1GB RAM. The Weather app isn’t an outlier, and the new Outlook typically consumes between 600–750MB RAM as well.
Taken together, these apps can use nearly all your RAM before you even start work by opening a browser. Not to mention the telemetry and ads they include.
Microsoft’s 8GB RAM pitch for Windows 11 doesn’t hold up
One built-in app can burn through an eighth of your memory
Memory prices are no joke, and buying a new computer has become so draining on the wallet. This is why 8 GB RAM computers are making a comeback, like the new Surface laptops or the MacBook Neo, the latter of which is now closing in on the $1000 mark. Specifically for Windows, Microsoft claims that 8GB RAM is enough, and nobody is too convinced by their statements.
I’ve tried that configuration myself, and I’d call it more of a baseline setup since you barely get any breathing room with it.
The test I did was using Windows 11 normally, as I’d do without any heavy workloads, and after disabling all the startup apps and not using any first-party Windows apps, e.g., Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Weather (no, I will never use a separate app just to know how humid it is out there).
Even though these apps are essential to my daily workload, using first-party apps on an 8 GB configuration would be nearly impossible because your system will already be swapping to disk before you even start doing anything on your PC. So, unless Microsoft does something about the first-party apps, their own pitch doesn’t really hold up.
Help might be on the way for Windows 11’s bloated apps
The K2 initiative wants to move first-party apps to WinUI 3
The visual redesign for Windows 11 means nothing if the core apps are dragging it down, but fortunately, that won’t be the case forever. Microsoft is familiar with the first-party app situation, and it’s already building a dedicated engineering team to address it, led by Rudy Huyn, Partner Architect at Microsoft.
As part of the Windows 11 “K2” initiative, these first-party apps will switch to WinUI 3, the newer native UI framework for desktop apps that delivers major performance gains. However, changing to a newer UI framework alone doesn’t mean anything unless they change the underlying code, startup, memory management, and more to gain actual ground in minimizing resource consumption.
This work might also be limited to first-party apps within Windows, like Search, Clock, and Weather. Other apps like Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and OneDrive are different from the core Windows service, so it’s unclear whether they’ll be included in this effort, at least for now.
These efforts might take a while
Right now, Microsoft’s efforts focus on improving the shell components. While I’m excited about the upcoming Taskbar, Context Menu, and other changes, it will be a while until we see improvements for the first-party apps, possibly even for the 27H1 update next year.
The memory crisis is expected to ease up in the middle of 2027, and I’m worried it might be too late for Microsoft to fix the issues then, especially since they shouldn’t have existed from day one.