From September, Microsoft Teams will get a lot better on Mac – here’s why

Since the beginning of 2020, Microsoft Teams has become an integral part of the business world. But it won’t be until later this year that the ultimate communication app while working from home will support Apple’s M1 and M2 chips. This is what you need to know.

Microsoft Teams for M1 and M2 chip

For the first time, Microsoft has given a concrete date for a version of Teams that runs ‘natively’ on Apple’s M1 and M2 chips. In September 2022, Microsoft Teams will be released as a universal app for everyone.

The company has announced this in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The upcoming version of Teams is then designed for both Apple-silicon Macs and Intel-based Macs. No further details are known yet.

It remains unclear whether the native version of Microsoft Teams will work at all without Apple’s Rosetta. Rosetta is a translation layer that silently and automatically runs Intel software on Macs with the ARM architecture. The current beta versions of the ‘native’ Teams still require Rosetta for individual parts of the program, but fortunately these are not loaded by default. With this you can also have an almost ‘native’ version on your Mac.

Microsoft Teams users increasingly irritated

Mac users on the Microsoft forum have become increasingly impatient and angry over the lack of support in recent months. Office for Mac has had a universal app since late 2020, but Teams is still waiting for the necessary adjustments.

The Intel version of Teams is (despite Rosetta) experienced by users as slow, memory-consuming and error-prone. Whether the native version will fix all these issues in one fell swoop remains to be seen. In any case, early beta versions of Teams, which Microsoft has been making available for download since spring 2022, have started up much faster and respond much faster to input. However, they still have some very serious bugs here and there. And, of course, you don’t want to be kicked out of that important video meeting because the software isn’t cooperating.

Extra bad: Microsoft hasn’t mentioned a reason at all why adapting Teams for Apple silicon is so difficult. It can’t really be the processor architecture. Teams has been available for Windows on ARM since 2020.

Remarkable that Teams works so poorly

It is also remarkable that Teams runs so poorly on Macs with an M1 or M2 chip. Because the Macs with these chips are among the best and most powerful computers you can buy right now. For example, Apple recently released the MacBook Air 2022. A super light laptop that comes close in performance to the fastest Windows laptops. The MacBook Pro 2021 is even faster in its various versions.

We’ve said it before iPhoned, but there’s no better time to get a new Mac than now. At least in terms of performance. And hopefully that Teams problem will soon be a thing of the past.