CheaperMac - living with a cheaper, less powerful Mac.

CheaperMac is a tool designed to simulate the experience of living with a less powerful Mac than the machine running the simulator:

• fewer CPU cores
• less memory (RAM)

How it works

• CPU Simulation: The tool can simulate fewer CPU cores by spawning busy-loop processes that consume the extra cores, making them unavailable for other tasks.
• Memory Simulation: The tool calculates the difference between your total system RAM and a memory target and allocates that extra memory. It then uses mlock to lock it into physical RAM, preventing the operating system from swapping it out.

Installation

Either download the binary from Github releases page or use pip install cheapermac to install it from PyPI.

Usage (CLI)

Run the cheapermac command in a terminal window:

cheapermac  # use the defaults (same as shown below)
cheapermac --cpu 5 --memory 8.0  # leave 5 cores and 8 GB free to use

To stop the simulation, simply press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

The defaults are similar to the resources offered on a Macbook Neo 2026.

Important Notes

This tool allocates real physical memory. While it has safety checks, using it on a system that is already under high load might lead to performance degradation or application crashes. Use with care.

The simulation is not perfect:

It does nothing to simulate other differences, like SSD I/O, GPU, cooling, USB speed, network speed, etc.

It only deals with CPU core counts, not with speed differences of the cores, like super/performance/efficiency cores or just older/newer cores.

Demo

# Running on a Macbook Pro M3 Pro with 12 cores and 18 GB of RAM:
tw@MacBook-Pro Downloads % ./cheapermac          
System Total Cores: 12
CPU core limit to simulate: 5
Starting 7 busy loops to simulate core reduction...
CPU simulation started.
System Total RAM: 18.00 GB
Memory limit to simulate: 8.00 GB
Attempting to lock approximately 10.00 GB of RAM into physical memory...
Allocated: 0.98 GB...
Allocated: 1.95 GB...
Allocated: 2.93 GB...
Allocated: 3.91 GB...
Allocated: 4.88 GB...
Allocated: 5.86 GB...
Allocated: 6.84 GB...
Allocated: 7.81 GB...
Allocated: 8.79 GB...
Allocated: 9.77 GB...
Allocated: 9.96 GB...
Simulation is active.
Press Ctrl+C to stop the simulation and free resources.
^C
Stopping CPU busy loops...
CPU processes stopped.
Releasing memory...
Memory released.
Exiting.