My MacBook is getting on a bit.

It's an Air M1 model that I bought about two and a half years ago and overused for two and a half years.

Think 70+ tabs regularly kept open across two browsers (Safari and Brave) with media playing in the background, like YouTube or Insta and so on.

It all went well until it started going wrong.

A few weeks ago, my Mac started telling me it didn't have enough memory to process it all.

So I cleared up some cache here and deleted some massive files there and it worked.

For a bit.

Then it started giving me the same error again, and so I cleared even more cache and deleted even more files.

It was fine.

But then the screen started playing up.

If you leave your MacBook in standby, even with media playing, what happens is the screen will go black first, and then it'll go on full-on standby with the screensaver where you're asked to enter your pin code/password.

The media will continue playing in the background.

This is how it's supposed to be.

Great.

Except, my Mac now goes on standby faster, and the screen turns black sooner, and it sometimes doesn't turn back on unless I reboot it.

I asked Grok and it's basically telling me it's either an hardware problem or a software problem. Duh.

But I don't want to buy a new one yet, so I'll see what happens next.

But I'll say this. We're all so dependent on technology it's quite scary.