This is great especially because there is still no M1 version of teams and running the Intel version of teams on M1 makes the whole computer slow to a crawl.
But, at this point, I have to wonder if teams is just abandonware. Stuff like this thread and the lack of M1 support 2.5 years after the M1 transition was announced and over a year after you could walk into an apple store and buy an M1 computer? I don't understand what could prevent them from releasing an M1 version besides a complete lack of will to do so.
Almost all Microsoft software feels like abandonware, which is wild when you consider how heavily they're promoting and profiting from it and how many and how heavily people use it.
I remember that microsoft had essentially sunsetted Microsoft Teams while they worked on a complete rewrite to be built into Windows. They were partially through it...
And then Covid happened.
Then, they had to go back and work on the old app, fixing as many issues as fast as they could because now a lot of people suddenly depended on the app.
To their credit, they did eventually fix the most pressing issues (more than two video streams showing at once, push-to-talk mode, etc...), but I do think they'll need to go back to a rewrite that can be used cross platform.
I agree, I know it isn’t new with Microsoft, but they sure do consistently release slow buggy software. It would seem that a company as large of Microsoft could get ahead of the issue, but perhaps it their size and beurocracy actually make it harder to quality control.
I've had nothing but negative experiences with Microsoft and their products on macOS. Unsurprisingly, dealing with their "support engineers" is maybe even more frustrating than using a macOS device that is infected with their software.
Speaking as an experienced person when dealing with M365 products in our fleet, I absolutely, 100%, cannot, in good conscience recommend for any company that supports macOS devices to purchase or use any Microsoft products. There is simply no amount of money you can pay (I'm fairly certain we have one of the highest license tiers) in order to get any assurance that you will get any meaningful functionality or support from them.
Yeah I was in the same position. Support is useful when the issue is documented in the kbase. Which 95% of our issues aren't because it's they were I would have found the answer myself already.
The support people are outsourced and seem to be penalized for escalating so they really know no more than we do. Getting them to escalate something is really a fight. They tend to stall us requesting the same extensive logs over and over.
My Win10 laptop has started shutting off the WLAN device at the worst times, and it seems to happen when a Bluetooth mouse is connected and a battery charger is plugged in at the same time.
The troubleshooter and report forms both crash on opening.
I guess that's one way to hit a "zero negative feedback" KPI!
I've had WLAN shutoffs related to drivers, would you consider that hardware or software? Are you thinking power droops or what's the hardware history of WLAN shutoffs look like?
I'm suspecting a power issue and that the internal WLAN and Bluetooth device are likely on the same USB root hub. Have you checked the manufacturer for newer USB drivers?
Honestly just having microsoft software adhere to apple human interface guidelines and the menu system improves it infinity percent (∞%)
Using office360 is a confusing jumbled mess.
I can't help but think it's on purpose.
I remember talking to an ex-microsoft guy decades ago about some incompatibility with some third party thing. I said sometimes new engineers didn't know how their software would be used or interact with other stuff. He told me not to be naive. Microsoft had meetings trying to figure out "how can we own this?"
If you're running an Apple Silicon Mac you can get an early build of Teams osx-arm64 from the exploration build link listed here.[0]
I've been running a daily build for a few weeks and it's noticeably better than the Intel build on an M1 Pro. It launches in half the time and feels far more responsive (probably due to not needing to use the Rosetta JIT for Electron). That said it's still a daily "exploration" build so YMMV.
It's not abandoned, they are working on it a lot. Every month sees major updates. The problem is that they are only working on adding glossy new features and ignoring performance. So it's becoming ever glossier and ever slower.
When it first came out it was pretty snappy. Now I can't switch to another chat tab without a loading spinner, statuses are not updating anymore unless I click on them etc..
Given how hard MS has been pushing RTO, and how unlikely they are to be Mac users, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just don’t feel the pain like everyone else and therefore don’t care.
For work, I have to run Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Discord. Of those 3, Slack surprisingly uses the least amount of memory (~700 MB), and Teams uses the most (~1.5 GB). I dusted off an old Intel Mac (literally) and interact with it using Universal Control. It only runs those 3 chat apps + mail. It's turned out to be a great way to offload resource hogs and as an added benefit, it minimizes distractions. I'll occasionally glance at the dock to see if there are any notification badges, whereas on my main Mac, I'd feel compelled to deal with notifications immediately.
When I have to share my screen or focus on a conversation, I'll fire up one of those 3 apps on my main (M1) Mac and quit it when I'm done.
Universal Control still feels rough around the edges, but it has saved me from ditching my Macbook Air and shelling out for an M1 Macbook Pro. Sometimes there are issues with reconnecting to the Intel Mac, but it seems to resolve itself if I wait a bit or turn off/on wifi.
You may be right. I don’t know how it works. I’ve noticed that when a new video-enabled user shows up on the screen, there is a delay between the user profile showing and the video overlay presenting itself, so I was assuming that was where a stream was being started for that video feed.
Yes, although I'm not sure if the hidden streams use bandwidth. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Teams handles individual streams usually, while meet usually muxes them to save bandwidth. Zoom is easily the most efficient of the big four and I think uses a whole bunch of compression tricks.
I'm pretty sure the video limit for teams is 25 simultaneous video feeds (in a 5x5 grid) and anything more than that gets switched in and out as people talk.
Is there a real use case for seeing more than 25 users' video feeds at a time?
It «works», but still takes up a lot of resources (gigabytes of RAM and a whole CPU core while in video meetings),and depending on sso policies might require you to sign in several times a day. It’s also limited to four video streams.
I quietly use Teams every day. I'm not a particular fan of it but it doesn't get in my way more than an Electron splash at boot and an ugly purple icon at bottom right. This is on a rather elderly HPE laptop - dmidecode says: "HP 250 G6 Notebook PC"
I used to have audio snags with it but those went away and I migrated to pipewire about 12 months ago and the audio quality has improved.
I do lack some "features" like background blurring etc but I note that BBB manages to do it fine.
It does look like there is a lack of love for Team on Linux but it sounds like the third class citizen is Mac.
Continuing on with what the other poster said, when run as an "app" it then also eliminates the regular address bar and other buttons that are common on a full web browser so it "feels" more like a native app. There's also metadata that the app can use to add to the "jump list" feature of the Windows taskbar. You can then also get added as a target to "share" on Windows. There's a number of features that you get access to as an installed PWA at least on Windows compared to just being a webpage in the browser.
Since we're on this topic: Up until a few weeks ago I swear when I got an invitation link and opened it in Firefox I could just join with the browser. Then two weeks ago it forced me to download the app for linux, no way to join with the browser.
Is there any workaround for that? Faking the user agent? I didn't have the time then to grab an extension and start fiddling around, so I just spun up a VM and installed the app...
It's depressing to see that chat (both textual and video) was a solved problem over a decade ago with single-core CPUs measured in hundreds of megahertz and low-hundreds of megabytes of RAM but nowadays despite orders of magnitude more resources it's apparently became an impossible problem.
I did this, but the problem was that I never got any notifications. I did not block notifications at all, but I got little to no notifications especially for when meetings started. I had to revert to full app because of this.
Messing around the edge://flags to toggle native notification on or off, I remembered that the default notification mode has bug currently. Also ensure you grant it permission of notification in system setting. That isn't done by default.
Thank you! I checked windows system notifications & it looks like edge notifications were already enabled but I did need to turn on the teams.microsoft.com notifications in edge.
Does that really help? I’ve tried teams web app in chrome and the performance is equally depressing as the Linux desktop app. Memory usage is ok but I really don’t enjoy waiting 2 seconds for every click.
A more extreme tip is to not use it on your desktop at all. Just use the iOS app, it hurts me to praise Teams but that app is not just decent, it’s actually very good. Fast, stable, good ux, all the features you need. Just missing a way to connect a proper keyboard and share my main desktop screen.
IMO the iOS app is better, but there are some bugs if one uses many instances.
I was using both desktop and iPad versions and somehow I was getting incoming calls on the iPad from people who were not calling me, but who did maybe 30 min before. Not just the notification but "so and so is calling you right now". It was very confusing.
It completely refuses to launch. Now I wouldn't be surprised if audio/video features may legitimately not be supported, but at least text messaging should work.
You can allow cross-site tracking and third party cookie in safari, then use teams from safari. I have been using it this way without any issues for all my Teams meetings.
Lets have no illusions. Teams is the absolute worst I have seen for teams. Basically every other tool I tried worked better.
However, Slack isn't that much better. It still gaslights Firefox users and tells them their browser is not supported. What a nice way to put it, that after friggin' years, they still have not managed to implement voice chat in a standard conform way. Discord and others have had this for years! Only Slack and Teams (in browser) seem to have incapable development teams behind them, who are comfortable with gaslighting unsuspecting users into using Chromium-based browsers, furthering web mono-culture.
There are so many issues with Teams, that I am wondering, what they are even working on. Surely they cannot be bugfixing all day, if so many bugs remain after years. We've had 2-3 years of pandemic now. What the heck are they doing!? They could have made the business. Instead they shove this broken thing down our throats and time will come, when people will just run away screaming, just like they did with Skype. Another business opportunity of MS ruined by bad quality software output.
Stuff like that should get banned immediately, before it can harm the web any more, than it already has.
Without any inside knowledge, but having been part of many mega-projects like this I'm willing to take a stab at it: new features vs. QoL is a huge, huge tension that exists in projects like these.
New features get new customers, and more importantly gets execs excited and people promoted. Refactors, performance improvements, etc, are almost never appropriately rewarded or prioritized, so QoL problems tend to accumulate until a crisis moment, where the organization is forced to shift priorities to address a user experience that has badly degraded to the point of significant customer revolt.
I saw this with a front-row seat with Google Maps: features kept getting piled in to the app (did you want to know what the most popular dishes at a restaurant is? Now you can!) while renderer performance continually regressed, map overlay rendering bugs accumulated, and the original "slippy map" UX degraded. At this point the mobile app is deeply unpleasant to use - it hitches regularly and has trouble hitting 60FPS even on top-flight flagship phones. The product clearly hasn't reached the "crisis" moment yet, but it is on a trajectory to.
Teams seems like it might be at (or near) the crisis moment. It's a shame that organizational dynamics prevent these sorts of issues from deteriorating to this point, but it's a pretty common feature among product teams to prioritize new feature dev while existing (and way more core) features degrade.
> refactors, performance improvements, etc, are almost never appropriately rewarded or prioritized
Another variant that I've seen: actual refinements and improvements just aren't simple enough to sell to management, or to new junior devs. So they'll be all excited about switching over to the next big framework that finally makes things fast and refreshing, for the first time ever! But the migration still has some bugs that haven't been worked out and some features that haven't been ported ... and a year later things are actually worse than where we started, so repeat with the next big framework that finally makes good software possible for the first time!
This is a huge failure of management where it occurs - and one of the chief causes for it is short leadership tenure.
Places where leadership remains stable over long periods tend to do better on this front. You pay for some big architectural overhaul, but you insist that you live on the new thing long enough to actually ship features before you go into the next cycle of renewal.
But in some companies leadership tenure is short - execs stick around for 2-3 years max, which is just enough time to complete an architectural migration but not enough to ship stuff on it!
The Google Maps site and application are both deeply unpleasant to use if only because, when you click on a search result, the fucking map doesn't zoom in from an almost state-level view to show you where the fuck the listing is.
Yeah, that's the kind of basic QoL stuff that's really the nuts and bolts of a product, but tend to get glossed over in planning.
When working out their OKRs teams generally do not have an entire Objective for "iterate, prevent regressions, and improve upon existing core features". They instead have a litany of Objectives to add completely new things.
Performance regressions are just the tip of that iceberg (though it is most noticeable), but a component of this upkeep is keeping up with the competition on your core already-shipped stuff. IMO Apple Maps' zoom behavior, rendering behavior, overlay behavior, etc, are far superior to Google's. It wouldn't be rocket science to implement their version of these changes, but clearly it's not being prioritized.
I think google maps is close to the crisis point. Where niche alternatives exist, people will use those instead. One of the reasons I bought an iphone was to have apple maps as an alternative to google maps.
> It still gaslights Firefox users and tells them their browser is not supported
I checked in to this a few weeks, and it really doesn't work for technical reasons. They use some deprecated experimental Chrome API (which is also slated for removal). Slack in general is an absolute mess in terms of engineering.
It just so happens that I had to use Teams the other day for a job interview, and at the last possible moment it notified me that Firefox doesn't work for video :-/ Had to hastily install Chromium. Didn't look in to the reasons for that.
Nice, I'll go ahead and propose to my company that has everything on Azure and is a total MS whore to switch their 10000-somewhat employees over to Discord.
I can tell you something they are working on and its not bug fixing but more bloat: They are adding games to teams so you can play solitaire while having a call. Not sure what kind of product manager thought that is a good idea but here it is!
I leave it running continuously for weeks on my Mac, with no issues. It is currently using 700MB across all of its processes (5 by my count). Doesn't seem like that big of a problem.
I understand it used to be a much larger problem. Maybe it's time to try it out again.
My problem with the app isn't resource usage, it's that a chat client that's already a webpage shouldn't need me to install a app. It's ridiculous how far slack will go on purpose to not support the platform their app is built on.
As a chat client that facilitates communication with my coworkers, I don't want to limit it to a tab in Chrome. Chrome is an app that I close often, I can't recall a time I've wanted to close Slack.
I never close my browser unless I have to, but sure that might not be the normal behavior. I still don't get why they can't give an acceptable experience on the platform they built it on without wrapping it in a useless wrapper.
Keep the app, just make sure I can use your service on the platform it's built on.
That's fine but they should make it possible to use it completely in-browser as well. I'm not a fan of having five Chromium instances constantly running on my MacBook.
Memory is designed to be used. I guess if I'm memory constrained I can close it, but it's never been the source of any of my day-to-day problems while coding.
Memory is designed to be used, and there are plenty of applications that are vying for it. I'd much rather an app use memory optimally, so that I don't have to close it if I'm memory-constrained.
Toxic? It aligns exactly with my personal experience today. Coworkers often try to call me using Slack, but I'm always present "Nope in Firefox" dialog.
And if you think the Slack app is anything other than a webpage, then you really need to look into that more. As someone else posted, it is a webpage wrapped in a bundled chromium package.
It's an electron app. That's not a webpage bundled with chromium, it shares a large number of components but functions quite differently. It's not surprising that your web experience sucks relative to the app.
I installed the Slack app and it was even slower than using it from Firefox. There's a noticeable delay when typing (sometimes more than other times) like you're typing over ssh, and starting the thing takes just as long as just opening it in Firefox.
Actually I don't want the app, as I don't trust Slack as an organization. Who knows what their app does on my computer or what it could do, even if it is an electron app? I prefer running things in the browser sandbox, at least limiting them somewhat.
Discord is probably the only company that can make voice+chat+streaming software right.
It's insane how bad Teams' chat is.
I don't know who was crazy enough to paste fucking formating with text,
so when you copy from IDE/docs/whatever then Teams applies font sizes / colors and makes mess, so you have to copy stuff to e.g notepad and then to Teams. Additionally leaving `` block sometime doesn't work <wtf>
Cool software doesn't do crazy shit with Clipboard and Links
__________
lack of Push2Talk option (not mute/unmute btn) is tragedy, did those people ever play some video games with teams/guilds?
Ventrilo had this feature in probably 2003, Discord uses it too, but enterprise communicators struggle to figure this simple feature despite being so good, especially when everybody was WFH and had people in the house talking.
____________
On the positives side - calendar and its integrations are unparalleled and meetings are decent.
I'm so happy Microsoft's attempt to buy Discord died. Intuitively it would have been great, MS would be able to leverage Discord tech and make their other products better. The reality would have been, like their purchase of Skype, to continuously make the product worse until it becomes as bad as all the other MS products.
Discord is still lackluster on many fronts. Their implementation of threads is probably the worst I've ever seen or used, for example.
That said, it is a great platform to use nowadays. But as someone who's used it (literally) daily since 2015, it's worth pointing out that it took them a significant amount of time to get to this point, and they still have ways to go.
I've desperately wanted to spend money on a better solution like this, but gaming being the only major use case makes it a difficult sell to the rest of the team. That cute UI bullshit wears thin very quickly in a work setting. It's also really tricky to get other 3rd parties and vendors to join your discord meetings in 2022.
All they would need to do is remove a bunch of gaming-related crap and sell it as Discord for Business to take our money from us. Maybe just a light sprinkle of outlook integration would be nice too. I'd sign annual agreements for this today if it was an option.
Agreed. Don't understand why they don't do it. Would love to have my employer spend money on Discord, indirectly financing free voice chat for my evening gaming sessions...
The (forced) threaded chat in Teams is an absolute nightmare and I refuse to believe they dogfooded it to see if it was actually useful. It just made everything take a whole bunch of extra time and effort to follow and comes across as a feature that someone thought was just kinda neat without caring to determine actual usefulness.
Do teams really have that many separate discussions in a single chat so often that it necessitates threads instead of, say, splitting those broader topics into new rooms? That also lets users mute or otherwise adjust notification settings for things are are less relevant to them. Last I remember, threads barely even reported new messages inside them, and would only show the first message, so the team chat just looked dead forever the moment it was added.
I sometimes want to keep formatting when copy and pasting documentation from the KB in the web. Keeping formatting helps with emphasis and colored text and bullets in documentation.
In teams on Mac, to paste as plaint text on a mac, when you paste, use Shift + Option + Command + V, it appears to work for me. The Shift + Option modifiers doesn't seem to work with the right-click menu, but it does with the keyboard. For windows it may be Control+Shift+V. https://www.howtogeek.com/807223/ctrlshiftv-is-the-best-shor...
See, that's just ridiculously backwards. If you want to paste something special, then you use paste-special. Otherwise, just paste the damn text like every other thing on the planet. Paset Special shouldn't do the normal/expected thing. It should do something other, special, thing that is outside of the normal/expected thing.
> Discord is probably the only company that can make voice+chat+streaming software right.
Discord is absolutely terrible though compared to what I'm used to. The default settings are bonkers — you get badges and dots and all the crap EVERYWHERE, but it turns out those all are super-important @all @here @everyone "server announcements". Broadcast mentions should just never have been invented. They definitely shouldn't be displayed the same as personal mentions. And Discord notification settings aren't easy to configure correctly. I somehow managed to mute a "server" so much that I wasn't receiving even direct mentions, when my intention was to only disable non-direct ones.
The UX for when you haven't been reading a chat for a while is also awful.
The UX in general, with it being an Electron app and implementing all controls and their behaviors from scratch, just can't technically get even close to feeling macOS-native. This, the forced auto-updating, and having to run one more Chromium instance, made me realize that I can run it as a browser tab and not lose anything.
> Discord is absolutely terrible though compared to what I'm used to
What are you used to? Genuine question. I've tried many options and to be honest, discord has been the nicest so far. Yeah, it's far from perfect - but I still found it way better than slack, teams, meet, zoom. Although I personally don't really mind the mentions - I spend a decent amount of time in public servers, and have learnt to just suppress what I don't want (I also run windows, not macOS, so maybe that's also part of the "issue"?)
On the Electron UX part — I just don't like apps implementing their own controls instead of using system ones, regardless of how it's done. (yes, both Telegram clients that run on macOS are guilty of this as well)
I've checked Google Docs and Libre Office and they both use Ctrl+V for formatted paste, and Ctrl+Shift+V for unformatted paste (Libre office gives a menu to choose).
I cant check MS word as I don't have it installed, but it seems to me that Teams is closer to using the default behaviour here.
Google Docs and Libre Office are document editing software,
Browsers (but it may be due to lack of support in controls?), Text Editors like Notepad++, Notepad, Discord, Textboxes do not behave like this
Idk honestly.
While I do expect format to follow between excel/word, then pasting it to other apps not something I expect. That's really rare case where I've found it useful.
The most ridiculous situation is when you paste from docs to github and it creates screenshoot or some weird, giant xml that causes site to hang for 10sec
Since that I'm heavily against programs messing with CTRL+V
But I think this does match the default in other software. I'm sure if you copy/paste from Excel to Word the default would be the fully formatted table not plain text.
> Discord is probably the only company that can make voice+chat+streaming software right.
This made me chuckle ruefully. I mean, you're not wrong.
I'd describe Discord's UI as "okay" at best. It's missing some features that were standard in chat clients from twenty years ago. But it's so much better than every other "collaboration" app out there that it looks stellar by comparison.
To fix Teams formatting issue on MacOS once and for all you can go to System Preferences->Keyboard->Shortcuts->App Shortcuts, then add a new shortcut by pressing (+), choose "Application": "Microsoft Teams", "Menu title": "Paste and Match Style", "Keyboard Shortcut": "⌘V", and click "Add". Done!
I don't get the forced top level Communities/Servers/Workspaces. I guess I'm not typical since a lot of messengers seem deeply invested in this design (Discord, Slack, Element) but for personal use I really just want DMs and groups. Even just switching between two Discord Servers and one DM gets old really quick. I get why Slack does it, it makes sense from a work context. (At least until you have a public Slack, private Slack, a kubernetes slack and more that are a pain to switch between). But for personal I just hate it.
> I don't know who was crazy enough to paste fucking formating with text
Control+Shift+V pastes without formatting in Teams. It’s even right there in the documentation.
The default of “pasting with formatting” is likely what non-technical users expect, and actually works great for pasting snippets of web pages including images
i enjoy sharing live copies of microsoft office documents for collab work with peers. it works fairly well as a shared file repo for simple things like powerpoint/excel. the purley chat functionality of teams needs work, but doesn't seem like to heavy a lift to accomplish long term. my experience with meetings has always been pleasant, the audio switches seamless when i connect my bluetooth audio and the meeting UI is solid. not sure i understand where all the hate comes from. works well enough when your company is already an MS office shop
Teams will literally crash my 16 inch i9 Macbook Pro (2021). Failing that, it will drain the battery in an hour or two (even when nothing is happening on teams). God forbid I try to copy or paste some text on teams...
Teams is an absolutely garbage app and platform....on a good day
My company uses Teams (thank god for meetings only, we use Slack for chat) but it's become a running joke of sorts that I have to "drop for memory". At least once a week I'll be in the middle of the meeting and have to say: "sorry I have to drop and join again, Teams is eating my memory". For context I have a 16" MBP, i7, 16GB RAM.
Am I the only person who likes teams? My company uses it heavily for text and video chats and I think it's pretty great, and don't get the bugs and slow performance issues of others. I wouldn't call it snappy, but still fine, and makes communications very easy.
I'm using a surface laptop 3. Maybe MS did the apple thing of making software that only works properly on their own hardware
Does it let you receive real time notifications from other organisations, or do you only get them from the one you're 'active' in? That was the dumbest thing ever and caused me to constantly miss messages from clients (or my actual employer, if I was signed into the teams space for a client) until I got an email a few hours after someone had sent a message. I just don't get why they'd choose to artificially restrict it with such a deficient model.
Other things that sucked:
- search never seemed to find anything I wanted, and I never knew why, but I can always find what I want in e.g. Discord so pretty sure the problem isn't actually me
- copying and pasting code was always a nightmare with formatting
- if you called someone at the same time as they called you, who knows what could happen, it couldn't handle the multi-device nature of it all
- general latency, everything was slow and with a delay (which I think contributed to the issue just above)
- the file viewer sucked immensely, and never was improved
- resource use on Mac OS was often abysmal
- updates constantly caused further issues, to the point it became a joke with the team when we'd encounter new bugs
- delivery of message notification emails was inconsistent if not signed in at all. Sometimes it would be near instant, other times it would be hours later, and sometimes days later. Never had that issue with other services like Slack, so also don't think that was on our end.
- ghost calls, where teams would think someone was in a call, but it had been cancelled, causing misc. issues with calling back etc.
I think so? Everyone I know at companies that have bought it also had employee-lead efforts to buy slack and/or zoom, and employees use those instead, like Adobe for example. I haven’t used it personally but I have only heard very negative things in my network.
I work for Microsoft (not on Teams). I actually don’t mind Teams much, it does the job and doesn’t seem much worse than Slack. But the crappy search is absolutely my biggest pet peeve.
For being descended from (and forcibly superseding) what was once the genericized trademark for video chat (Skype), it's pretty egregious that "not much worse than Slack" is the best Microsoft can do.
All Microsoft products have terrible search, Teams isn’t exceptional in this regard.
If you work at Microsoft, and have any influence on the WinDev team, please tell them that the Start menu search is simply shameful.
There hasn’t been a single major Windows release — server or client — capable of consistently, reliably, and correctly finding start menu items. Worse, every major release is broken in new and creative ways. This is especially true for a fresh install, because apparently a 64-core server needs several days to index 500 KB of text. (Microsoft support told me this with a straight face, almost verbatim.)
Seriously, what is that team doing!?
Is this the same code that’s in Outlook and Teams search too?
I use it on a standard spec windows laptop and it works fine… Little bit slow and stuttery in places and definitely a resource hog when screen-sharing but it has a ton of functionality that makes up for it.
From what I can figure this is kind of inherent when apps are electron based to be cross-platform. Similar experience with vscode.
Yeah I used it on a MBP for months before I left my last job. It struggled when a lot of people had their camera on but it seemed to improve over time. I wonder if it has to do with OS version or something. I didn't love it, but for video meetings it worked well enough for me.
It isn't just a Mac issue. I had a i9 / 64GB Ram windows laptop which turned into a furnace when I ran teams. I've been doing a lot of work on the couch over the pandemic and it was too hot to set on my lap.
I have since switched to a M1 macbook and it heats up too, but at least the processor is efficient so it doesn't become uncomfortable.
These issues simply did not happen on either laptop with Zoom. Teams is simply a horribly written piece of crapware. MS should be ashamed of themselves.
It works fine on Windows so you and your team will just have to switch to Windows on your PCs in order to continue using Microsoft's Office 365... /sarcasm
The Word thing in Teams is buggy, ‘open in app’ leads to better behaviour but you can end up in version hell. The online Word version doesn’t do the same things as Teams Word or the native app.
As a test, try moving a picture or editing a footer.
Not sure if I understand you properly, but if the entire operating system crashes due to one malfunctioning app then it sounds like a serious bug in the OS, right?
I don't use Mac myself but these days the operating system is supposed to continue running even if some specific app does something stupid.
Teams chat seems to work fine on my 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 processor. We typically use zoom for video calls. MS Outlook on the other hand frequently crashes. Maybe there’s a memory leak issue?
I don't know if the native app on the Mac is the same as the Windows one, but the latter is absolute crap. It's sooo laggy. Sure, I don't have a 64 core thread ripper or other ridiculous CPU, but even on my 11th gen i7 work laptop, the webapp runs circles around the native app. Even on Firefox on Linux.
However, they must have caught wind of this, because there have been some "improvements" recently, where they reduced the vertical screen space with an empty menu line, and it also feels a bit less snappy than before.
My wife uses Outlook (but not Teams) on her 2021 M1 MBP and there is some sort of leak. Her SSD fills up with swap files or something, and restarting gives her back 90GB of space. Literally. It is crazy.
I don't know if it's Outlook though. I have similar issues with my Intel MBP, and I don't use Outlook. I slowly drain from 20GB available down to 2, and then I have to restart. It's like living in the early 2000's, restarting all the time.
To be fair any app will crash the last Intel macs. They're probably one of the slowest computers in existence. You have to run fan control at full blast for it to even be usable.
Why when someone react on a chat message, opening the chat channel is not enough to dismiss the notification counter? No! I need to click on "Activity" tab. Here I see a list of my activities. The reaction is still here! Someone put an emoji on my text. I exult. Teams can now dismiss the notification counter...
I hate it, but... goto the chat channel and click in it.
I had someone on the team here send one, I was already in the chat and it still showed up in Activity. I just click in the message area and it goes away.
I still haven't figured out the logic behind dismissing notifications. Sometimes they just get stuck forever.
But the worst bug is that from time to time the freaking arrow keys stop working in the edit box! Last time it happened to me it lasted weeks and survived reboots. I can find references to this issue from 2019.
How can such basic functionality be broken I have no idea.
Teams is worse on Windows, but so is everything, especially Microsoft apps for some reason. I find them to be annoyingly-glitchy-but-usable on macOS but entirely unusable on Windows.
For me, it has one killer feature it doesn't have on other platforms: it can use native notifications, as opposed to showing a random window.
> but so is everything, especially Microsoft apps for some reason
This reminds of the Remote Desktop client. Until maybe a year ago, when they've introduced a similar client for Windows, the best RDP experience to be had was hands down on the Mac. A close second was Remmina on Linux. Windows was a complete shitshow. In particular, it wouldn't support resizing a connection window once it was open (technically it did, but it wouldn't update the resolution of the remote end).
It’s actually even more dumb: Teams does dismiss notification as they come into view. As they come into view. Notification is about a message you already see? Scroll away a little, scroll back again, bingo, notification dismissed. Works at least 90% of the time.
Sometimes it randomly misses entire bits of chat history. Once a colleague replied to an old chat message. I clicked on it and nothing happened. I scrolled up and I found out that I had an hole of 3 days on my history.
I've developed such a deep-rooted, passionate, magmatic hatred for Microsoft Teams that I'm now infamous amongst my friends for my mini rants. I'm a freelance software consultant, and many of my clients have their own Microsoft Teams Teams (?), and there's no easy way to join and switch between multiple teams using the same account. Typing is slow, and literally _everything_ else is too, and video calls regularly bring my 2019 i7 MacBook Pro to its knees.
If a witch approached me and told me she could make Microsoft Teams disappear for good at the cost of severing a finger (presumably for a potion...I've got no idea; I'm a developer, not a witch), I'd offer her two for the trouble.
Oh yes, that account switching thing is a pain... Their login page also redirects you a couple of times whenever signing in but I guess that's fine - it has to work with whatever custom security stuff Office365 customers have set on their instances. I just wish it felt less like a kludge.
Teams is hands down the worst piece of software I have used in my entire career. Not just because it's slow and resource heavy - the amount of bugs, idiotic design decisions, artificial restrictions and the constant wheel of changing features without giving the user any choice or say about any of them.....it all adds up. It's just an awful awful awful product.
I'm amazed by the extreme high quality of software that you've worked with. It doesn't come close to cracking any list for me. Tbh, I find it quite usable, with lots of useful features, and I can mostly count on it.
It really doesn't do anything especially bad IME. Teams on Mac just doesn't work at all. It's astonishing.
In the Windows desktop world, you can understand a lot by realising that Microsoft developers almost never install and configure Windows "from scratch".
They're given a preconfigured machine with a standard operating environment (SOE) image that has many small tweaks preconfigured. This is then connected to Active Directory and managed through Group Policy, which sets a bunch of configuration settings to sane values.
In other words, the people developing Windows are using it like 10% of their customers do (large enterprise), not like 90% of the customers (random individuals for home PCs or small business).
When I first realised this, a lot of little things suddenly "clicked" and made sense...
Some random examples of this:
Practically nobody at Microsoft gets given a PC or laptop with a HDR screen... so Windows does't do HDR properly.
Practically nobody at Microsoft has to worry about backups (it's centrally managed), so the backup capability built-in to Windows is trash and constantly broken and/or left to rot.
Everybody at Microsoft is "well connected" to the Azure cloud, so they assume every else is. Why not backup to One Drive? Uh.. because I'm satellite internet in the middle of nowhere!
Microsoft developers don't have to manage the SOE and its deployment process, so the tooling around this is... "not great".
Regional options, location, time zones, etc.. are all preconfigured and valid, so nobody at Microsoft thinks about what happens in "complex" cases... Like non-English-speakers using their products. Or being anywhere outside of the United States.
I was an early adopter of Teams and generally feel like MS gets too much criticism for e.g. Windows. I really wanted to like Teams. But having used it daily for two years, the only thing I'm impressed with is how badly they managed to mess it up. Whatever software team worked on this should be ashamed.
It caused my 3 year old high-end Windows laptop to hang completely after a few minutes of conversation, sometimes eating all my CPU with no activity whatsoever. Tried to do a clean boot, didn't help. Had to get a new laptop just because of Teams.
Microsoft needs to disband the Teams team and start afresh with a non-Electron base that’s better designed. MS Teams is awful on Windows too. It’s slow to respond and makes the system slower. Having 16GB RAM and not running anything else that’s heavy doesn’t make much of a difference either. MS Teams is like the camel in the story “The Arab and the Camel”. Teams won’t stop until it occupies the entire tent!
The problem isn’t with Electron. Electron is really fast. It isn’t even with voice or video or whatever. Those are native DLLs/libraries with good codecs if you have the desktop app installed.
No. The problem is that Teams was rushed to market a few years back to compete with Slack and whatnot. Using Angular.js (that’s right, not Angular 2+ which was already available). Years passed. Stuff keeps getting added. It’s still Angular.js.
On Windows: Quickly left-click on the tray icon a lot, you’ll then get additional options in its context menu.
I checked again and it indeed appears that at least part of the application was rewritten in a different framework. Most of it is still Angular.js though.
Discord doesn't, it's Electron too. That's not the root of the problem. Discord is pretty fast, I haven't really noticed it "chugging" and lagging like MSTeams does.
My problem with Discord is that I can't tell if it just poor UX or if it performance issues as well. Horrible app, I only use it cause I am kinda forced to keep up to some things going on there. Not unusual that you miss out on things even when you think you done everything to get notified. I don't even understand how the crap is supposed to work to be honest. Seems utterly broken. Fast of what? I can't understand wtf it is showing half of the time.
Edit: HN surprises, comments that can't be replied. Anyways. To stay up to date in the biz is hard enough. No need to add random Gremlins to that. Like not following basic UX rules.
>MacBook Pro 16" i9 with 16GB RAM every day. This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time
Firstly that entire era of MacBooks is hot garbage, literally. The case can’t handle the heat the processor creates. Even for basic tasks they all sucked and were probably the poorest performing Macs in multiple decades.
But here’s the real issue, end of the day there is no incentive for devs to build proper performant Mac apps anymore. The sheer cost and team required to ship one of these natively as well as on top of the iPhone and iPad apps which again require custom work each is absurd compared to just shipping a chrome wrapper that doesn’t seem to impact the success of an app at all, hard to name a popular Mac app these days that isn’t just a chromium wrapper, outside of video/audio/3D software.
MacBooks, which are frequently advertised as being "the greatest ever", run Teams so poorly while mediocre Windows and Linux laptops barely feel Teams running.
I write this from a client-issued $1000 Windows laptop that is running a ton of crap plus Teams with no fan sound to be heard. While the Intel MacBook next to me is screaming from just a few browser tabs and slack.
A browser tab and “just” shouldn’t appear in the same sentence, any given browser tab is running a large piece of complex software written entirely in JavaScript with no performance testing.
I just checked the tabs. 2 google searches, 4 stack overflow, spotify, azure devops git repo with a medium sized file opened. None of which are CPU intensive according to Chrome task manager.
So yes, they are "just" some tabs.
Intel macs are notorious for being literal hot screamers. I read similar complains frequently on HN.
Yes Apple has really disappointed me with their push to make native software difficult to built for their platforms. They're deprecating common 3rd party native libraries (OpenGL), their own native tools (kernel extensions - admittedly rarely needed), and making it difficult to do CI/CD for MacOS (no VMs).
I hear this all the time, but my 15" 2018 i7 model has been great. The 16" i9 models in particular seem to have the most complaints. Not sure what went wrong with those models.
Teams is by far the worst application I had to interact with in the last decade.
Sometimes I have to go to incognito to open meeting link.
Other times I have to open link from Chrome because opening from FF doesn't work.
Sometimes I have to reinstall it.
Sometimes audio decides not to work.
It takes 1 minute to launch it.
I mean, if you have a meeting, 10m notification in advance is about right as that's the time you need to start launching it and you should be just on time or just a little bit late.
I have no idea what the team developing teams is doing.
They should be all fired and rehired just to be fired again.
Maybe they're using teams for standups/meetings or something?
Remember Skype? How it could run in the background and get text messages and calls and not really cause any problems?
And then Microsoft bought Skype, and every subsequent version just kinda got a little shittier? And then MS puts effort into MSN Messenger and other not-Skype things despite Skype having a huge established userbase for both personal and professional use?
IIRC, they gave up with the later versions of Skype and used Electron for those too, but I still remember them being at least a little bit better than the absolute heap of shit that is Teams. I mean, it's almost like you have to put effort into being a shittier-than-average Electron app.
Thankfully there is only one person inside of one client company who insists on using Teams. I couldn't imagine having to use it every day. I have to presume that nobody inside of Microsoft uses it… I can't imagine this shit is being dogfooded.
At my previous job, I despised using Teams. I know, we're not supposed to be multitasking during meetings, but Teams harmed the performance of my computer so much during meetings that I was forced to focus on them. Heaven forbid if I had to be presenting (had to turn off incoming video for this to even be at all usable)! And, of course, one should assume if it's dragging performance down, that means the fans are going full speed the entire time. I have sensitive hearing, so I had to apply a power profile that turned down the fans without the computer overheating, which means lowering performance and making the Teams performance vampire worse.
And this wasn't on a mac. This is not a mac only issue.
I was so glad to learn my new job uses Slack, instead. It has its own set of problems, but it doesn't try to kill my computer.
The online chat experience is subjectively worse in the last 5 years or so compared to how it was in the '90s, '00s, and early '10s. I don't have the issues the OP has, but I do have significant lag with text input when typing in Teams or Slack. This was never an issue with IRC clients, XMPP clients, or aol/msn/aim/yahoo/icq instant messenger clients. I'm not sure about screen sharing, but I do know that video chat was supported by later versions of the proprietary ones.
At least screen sharing and video/voice chat works well on Zoom, even on Linux distros.
Worst part is Microsoft had Lync (not the post-skype reskin) which was a perfectly adequate office communication suite. The integration with the phone network was also quite nice.
It's an incredible piece of crap on an M1 Max too. It's by far the heaviest piece of software I run on it, and that's counting games and heavy Scala and F# development. A flippin video chat :)
Slack, which is also an incredible pos, feels snappy and lightweight in comparison.
Whoever thought that I’d want to edit a word doc in a frame in teams is insane. I’m not sure the use case where anyone wants to do that rather than launch Word or launch a browser.
It’s so dumb as it has a limited subset of functionality and takes over my screen from a meeting and only opens one document at a time.
That and if I try to link to a document it links to opening the document in teams. It’s so bizarre.
I can’t imagine the Teams team dogfooding Teams. Or perhaps I can and it’s some schizophrenic bizarre group who thinks it’s all intuitive.
It kind of reminds me of how crazy the Steam client is with it’s crappy browser stuff. But at least they have links working properly.
Didn't even know that was possible. But yes: huddling and sharing screens in slack actually deserves some credit because that always works well. (Jesus C. - I just gave software credit for working.)
In my mind Slack does not add one iota to mIRC 4.5 (?) which fit a single 1.44M diskette and came as a single executable. That shit started before the MouseUp event was even fired on pre-pentium hardware. What in the name of something holy happened?
I think I've mentioned this 5 times before on this website, but on Linux Teams will keep recording your microphone after you leave a meeting (which is easily verifiable through pavucontrol). In the year and a half that I worked at a company using Teams, this was always the case. The only way to make it stop is to restart the process.
Do you have adblock of some sort? Especially something at the DNS level, like the PiHole operating on your computer or network?
Because that will absolutely destroy Teams.
Teams tries to send Telemetry to MS, and the code is poorly written, where it keeps stacking up all those messages it was supposed to send, and keeps trying to resend them. This adds up and brings it to a grinding halt.
Try disabling the ad/dns blocking and see if it helps.
> Try disabling the ad/dns blocking and see if it helps.
Absolutely the fuck not.
It wouldn't surprise me if this turned out to be an issue, but the idea that the solution is to allow Microsoft to exfiltrate whatever the hell they like on the whims of their product management is abhorrent - not a solution.
> the idea that the solution is to allow Microsoft to exfiltrate whatever the hell they like on the whims of their product management is abhorrent - not a solution.
What? You’re already sending all the content of your chats and meetings to Microsoft servers. Why do you worry about sending telemetry that might actually help some dev fix some bugs?
For what it's worth, I run Microsoft Teams in its own isolated Chrome profile with almost no extensions (definitely no adblockers). It's been sitting in the background 99% unused for the past 4 hours and is currently wildly fluctuating between 500 and 850 MB of RAM usage + 8-12% CPU usage, despite not even being the focused tab in said Chrome profile.
That being said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a content blocker made it even worse. It's just... not very good software.
Only tangentially related; why is Teams removing space indentations in chats on MacOS? It’s so annoying when you type a piece of (pseudo) code, all leading spaces are removed! It drives me nuts, why would anyone implement this!
It's been doing that for a while, and I don't think it used to. I can't imagine it's intentional. Pasting formatted/styled text into Teams always ends up outputting some butchered version of what it originally was.
The one thing I hate about Teams and Outlook on Mac is that it takes a full minute to convert a smiley face :) to the emoji equivalent. Sometimes it even crashes the apps.
I haven't had this experience with Teams on my similar MBP 2016, but do experience it on a Surfacebook 2. I could never understand why these electron apps just destroy certain machines though. I'm not doing anything intensive on them. It would be lovely to have light-weight clients similar to mIRC just to do the daily chatting.
Teams is the worst Microsoft app i’ve used in terms of performance and reliability. critical UI elements like the mute button will suddenly disappear permanently. features like chat will disappear and reappear on reboot . i’ve been suddenly logged out in the middle of calls and prompted to enter microsoft login when it’s not needed . and ditto to the comments on memory and cpu consumption
As much as I hated Skype for Business it was at least reliably terrible.
Teams has a habit of silently logging me out even though I’m using it in a call. Stuff will just stop working because it decided it needed to reauth me without prompting. So I’ll be in a meeting and screen share will stop working or chat will stop working until I shut down and log in. Of course the top right profile still shows me logged in, but it lies.
It was real fun trying to figure out what was happening there. I found out because multiple people had IM’d me but Teams wasn’t showing me the messages. It was saying delivered to the sender. When I restarted I had a stream of new, unread messages.
The unreliability is the most frustrating part. How can the app lie about delivering messages?
Messaging reliability is critical. The expectations for consistency ( sender & recipient see the same view), reliability , low-latency , availability are so much higher than with a typical web or desktop app.
There are some apps that get the performance & UX quality standards and some that don't.
sadly i tried to use it today and again got caught in a recursive SSO of death. The team needs to be mindful of the criticality of making a call and get all of the unnecessary blockers out of the critical path
Lets set a new standard: if it doesn't run on raspberry Pi don't ship it. Not running on a Pi should be a rare, special-case exception (e.g. need to train a model on GPU).
Slack has been great for my company for about seven years now. There is a feeling that the development stalled a couple of years ago, probably due to Salesforce, Teams' market sweep and struggling to keep up with Discord's feature set, however, Slack still feels very polished for me -- a long time ago I've tried Mattermost and immediately noticed quite a lot of "paper cuts", tiny problems like wacky keyboard focus control that would be ignorable if I didn't know that Slack gets them right.
Teams is a nightmare. Don't get me wrong: I like Teams just because it's not Office Communicator/Lync/Skype for Business anymore, i.e. I can actually chat with people, but it's abysmal in every other way. Just today, I tried copy&pasting a quote, so I typed in "> ", the quote box appeared, but I couldn't leave the box anymore (to add a comment to the quote). Moving around with keyboard, clicking with the mouse didn't help. I tried inserting a couple of empty lines before pasting and noticed that I can move down in the text with the down arrow key, but the up arrow key would switch me to the "edit previous message" mode. And this stuff is everywhere and I'm not even talking about elementary stuff like being unable to stay logged in into different workspaces in different browser tabs at the same time. I'm happy to be using Slack right now and it pains me immensely that their fate is basically set, since their enterprise market share has been mostly eaten by Teams, they are way behind by user count and it will get even worse with Google Chat on the rise (which probably sucks too, but haven't tried it).
No BigCorp is going to cancel O365 because Teams sucks. Teams accomplished its objective of squashing Slack in enterprise, Microsoft has no incentive to improve it.
I can only assume the bosses at Microsoft are out golfing all the time and not using Teams or rather iMessaging each other.
Otherwise it makes no sense that they themselves would put up with the garbage that they have control of fixing. I would also be embarrassed of such low quality product, but I know that sentiment may not be shared universally.
What is fascinating about Teams is in how many different ways it fails for different people and setups.
I mean things like the electron app being behind the chrome web view (even through it's not much more then a web view and doesn't really add anything) is not surprising.
Like I have seen one or two cases of "uh teams fucked up my Laptop I have to restart", including with the electron app.
Many cases of "oh today teams decides to not allow screen sharing for me, this morning it did work?" (which then also randomly works again sometimes just by rejoining the call).
Also many cases of audio/mic randomly being terrible until you restart (through that might be the fault of chromes auto mic level adjustment).
My favorite is that when you hard switch of a mic it decides to warn you with a huge banner that you are muted ... but doesn't set your icon on muted. Which looks a lot like "we want to listen in even if you mute so please don't mute the mice on the OS level".
Also it sometimes randomly mutes you, like when you join a call (in chrome) to fast it hadn't yet loaded the "default mic on" setting so it's off (which for someone muting their mice with a physical button is just terrible UX).
But besides all it it still works better then Slack or worse Zoom in my experience. I mean it at least does work somehow most of the time even if with bad UX and drawbacks. While Zoom in my experience sometimes just doesn't work at all (on Linux/the web app). And in Slack if the connection is sup-par it's de-facto unusable.
EDIT: The most ridiculous is that they all decide to just not work on Firefox independent of weather Firefox supports the necessary APIs. In difference jitsi works in general better and on Firefox, which I could use it more.
> Which looks a lot like "we want to listen in even if you mute so please don't mute the mice on the OS level".
This is due to the "talking while on mute notification" feature. Disabling the mic by hardware or at the OS level breaks that feature. It certainly smells like a privacy concern, but the number of people who talk while on mute is also astoundingly common (myself included).
For me, on an intel mac, the issue is overheating. The CPU will throttle down to about 25% once it gets to hot and everything gets laggy/janky. Teams seems to crank stuff up enough to trigger this.
I've found that disconnecting the external monitor helps. (I'm guessing additional heat from the discrete GPU is part of the problem, but that is just a guess.) Probably wouldn't hurt to clean out the fans too.
For my non-work laptop that had performance issues while hot (for non-teams reasons), I resolved the issue by buying an M1.
I really don't understand why Teams is so frikkin' popular.
Anyone who ever used something else than Teams before the pandemic knows how bad a chat app it is, but since eg. management folk never used that stuff before the pandemic but now had to also WFH, they already had Teams from day 1 (M$ pre-installs it I guess, Linux-only guy here), so they forced that horseshit on everyone.
There really is no other excuse for it being the default in many cases these days. But it's absolute terrible.
Teams' primary market is big, legacy companies who are already typically forcing shitty (often Microsoft-based) tooling on their employees who don't have any say in it and are forced to use it (and may not have the confidence to resign because of that). Think companies where the primary browser used to be Internet Explorer 11 until somewhat recently.
Before Teams you would've typically seen Skype For Business there, so I guess compared to that it might be an upgrade. Employees there may never have used anything better so they don't realize how bad it is, and because the other tooling they are forced to use is just as bad, Teams doesn't particularly feel like an outlier.
That is Teams' target market and it excels at capturing it.
I love the way I have to restart it every few hours because it becomes impossible to alt*tab to it otherwise. I mean, alt tab and select teams and whatever you have open loses focus, but it doesn’t actually switch to teams.
I'm on a Windows laptop and use Teams for work. It's not as bad as the OP but still impressively substandard. Often times I won't be able to join a call and it'll freeze the entire program. I'll use ctrl+alt+delete to clear it from Task Manager and restart it and it still can't connect. A full reboot is needed.
I think MS should rewrite teams into .net or c++ just like the rest of office is written. Nobody would use Outlook if it was performing like Teams is today.
It's bizarre to me that smallish teams in the 90s were able to make native "apps"—sometimes even multi-platform—for markets so tiny that they'd be considered beneath notice now, but huge companies today only seem to be able to produce fragile low-quality resource-eating webtech shitware, with much larger teams. WTF happened?
Companies realized that they could save money by using mediocre coders to create MVP products using things like Chromium and then, instead of refining those products, they scale them up massively (which the MVPs were never intended for).
Management wants you to make a cross platform app, but with the minimum "cost". Who is going to spend all that time making 5 good apps when you can make 1 shitty one instead? I guess what actually happened is cross platform tech advanced, but this ease of development has actually worsened the user experience.
This might not be entirely related but something I've noticed is that whenever you see the promotional material for a modern UI toolkit you will find that it's marketed for ease of use for developers rather than making easy to use applications for users.
This is a developer culture problem as much as it is a technology problem. Developers (and their bosses) care less and less every year about runtime performance, stability, quality and so on. Management just figures it's easier to find a truck full of JavaScript developers than it is to find two good C++ developers, so everyone just agrees to choose technologies that are popular and trade off end user's needs for developer speed and comfort. The industry has sacrificed so much at the altar of "developer convenience".
But that’s just it. Markets are huge now. You have to be fast to market to grab a big chunk and dominate. No company who has Teams will use Zoom, and equally shitty product that was also rushed. If you have O365, you probably won’t use slack, Microsoft wins.
Teams needs a native rewrite or simply be relegated to a dumbass web app (which it effectively already is today).
The amount of bullshit my team puts up with around this product still shocks me. I sometimes wonder if this software is bad on purpose to condition us for something worse down the road.
So, everyone hates Teams, I can get behind that. But has anyone actually found out what Teams is doing in the background? Several people mention that Teams seems to be overloading the processor's I/O capabilities, but what is it doing exactly? What files is it writing to?
I know the i9 Macbook's cooler doesn't come close to the thermal output of an i9 so it's unsurprising that an overloaded laptop will cause all kinds of problems, but I wonder how MS managed to screw up this badly.
If you asked me what I hated most about my job, I would tell you it is Microsoft Teams.
I'm using Teams on three different devices and it's broken in a different way on each of them.
Teams on my phone will randomly stop receiving notifications.
The Teams app on Linux crashes when I try to open a video posted in a meeting on it, and it will also remember that location, so when I re-open it, it immediately dies again. Also I'm pretty sure that in Firefox voice calls were working like a week or two ago, then Microsoft decided that it's not supported again.
The Teams app on Windows lets you select between two different "away" statuses on the tray context menu, but one seems to crash Teams. I may be confusing it with the behavior when I hit the close button on the Teams window, and it just silently crashes: The window disappears but the tray icon stays there like a smug little fucker, pretending Teams is still running until you actually try to click it.
And those examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
Teams is mandated by our parent organization, but people use random other stuff amongst themselves, because Teams just doesn't work. There's some people who set up discord servers for their group, others are using an old slack server the company forgot to shut down, and there's probably people using whatsapp.
Teams is like a mail man who calls in sick every second week, throws letters that he doesn't feel like delivering away, and also tries to make smalltalk for half an hour when all you want him to do is deliver your damn letters.
I use a Dell laptop from 2017 with an AMD E2-6110 Quad core, SSD, 8GB memory and Debian 11 with an extra screen attached to the HDMI port. In this laptop I have Teams-Preview v1.5.00.100453 which I use heavily everyday for work (calendar, voice, video and chat). Teams takes about 30 seconds to start but after that just runs very well. No crashes, no issues with sound or video. Everything is responsive considering a laptop with such a slow processor.
Any new user to Teams on macOS will almost instantly be exposed to how little Microsoft gives a shit the first time they Cmd-Tab to Teams. Haha! Where's your focus now, loser?
Between that, and the beachball that appears because I dared type :) and it's trying to...what the hell is it doing? Go find smiley.jpg in your bag of resources and throw in the stream of bytes, how could you possibly fuck this up, Microsoft?
Teams is hot garbage. But posting Teams bashing threads on HN feels just preaching to the choir and beating dead horse for some fake internet points. As per guidelines, I don't find the topic to gratify ones intellectual curiosity.
I feel like Teams is gaslighting me. And my org’s IT signs its praises and is never able to recreate any of my issues.
These threads help me understand that it’s not just me. So it definitely helps gratify my intellectual curiosity as to whether I’ve broken with reality.
Lol last time I had a company issued laptop Teams would consume so many resources my browser wouldn't even be able to open up again until I rebooted. Worst application of all time...
I have my MacBook configured to never sleep and I leave Teams open on it. Even though the program is right there staring at me, if I work on another computer for a couple hours, after some time, Teams doesn't show me any incoming chats until I click on it, and then they flood in, showing me everything that I've missed.
This is my biggest issue with it. I log in at 10AM and keep working until 1230 or so. Then I click on Teams tray icon. I get all the messages flooding in. My team who needs me think I am an asshole who has been online for at least 2 hours and not responded to them. I have to remember to click on the tray icon the moment it appears in the tray to fix this.
Anyone else doesn’t receive anymore Teams Messages on their Macbook when you close the lid and then reopen? I have to restart teams, and i own 3 Macbooks with different Versions of MacOS and CPU Architecture, all show the same problem since a few weeks.
A lot of hate for Teams in the comments. I don't like it either, but it's the best big Microsoft (end-user) app I'm aware of.
It's not well designed, it is glitchy as hell - the other stuff is just worse. I was ecstatic when my work place added the calendar app to Teams because unlike Outlook that actually managed to do simple operations without freezing, crashing and reloading all the time.
Big tech's software quality standards are appalling. It's as if your bank's elevators don't have walls and everything smells like piss.
I'd also like to note that Teams calls are actually surprisingly stable and work better for me than most other options.
Big tech isn't releasing software. They're loss leading market killers designed to destroy competition. The state of the product obviously reflects that. The frustrating part is those making purchasing decisions aren't typically sophisticated enough to notice this fact.
The Teams organization had little interest in performance optimization. They spent more time cramming more features in. It seemed like, at the time, the Teams org valued feature creep for promos over actual stability and performance.
Electron and other web-site-as-desktop-app frameworks are a cancer that needs to be killed. It may have some legitimate uses but developing a communications client is not one of them.
Did people forget how to properly program for the desktop?
Yes. Script kiddies want to use javascript everywhere and desktop apps are dinosaurs. I wish it weren't that way. Maybe the lack of a good, widely adopted cross platform toolkit is to blame? Its a really hard problem though...
it's kind of wild that Teams is as bad as it is—doesn't it ship with Windows 11? it should be a first-class tool, but instead it's terrible. Discord, Slack, and countless other applications have figured out how to do markdownesque formatting, yet nine times out of ten I can't send a simple code block without resorting to using the "code snippet" button... but one out of ten times it works alright. baffling.
Even on Windows, MS Teams is garbage in terms of core instant messaging UX:
- it has a massive lag in syncing messages after your computer wakes from sleep or after re-signing in
- switching accounts is, again, unreasonably slow whereas Slack and Discord allow you to keep multiple accounts logged in at the same time.
- no triple-backtick code block syntax
- no true fullscreen video in the desktop client
I have also had a bunch of issues with Teams on Mac. Honestly I just use an iPad for meetings on Teams these days, it is the only way to get it to work. However I can never get the government Teams meetings to work on my iPad at all, end up just dialing in for those. On the Mac they just crash.
My work uses Skype for all conversations, I have noticed it getting just as bad for Mac. Randomly killing my webcam until restarting, absolutely stuttering.
Because the Monaco editor was a do or die for the TypeScript project so they threw everything in it to make it good and prove to MS higher ups to double down investing in TypeScript.
Whenever someone invites me to a meeting with MS Teams, I request them if we can do an alternate. Even if not, I still keep the alternate link handy. When the meeting starts and things don't work, I just give them the alternate link and they usually go, "This just works."
Most corporate users are not aware of alternates and just use the ones their company picks without questioning.
The worst part is that every time you launch Teams, it adds itself to your login items (on Mac, at least). It doesn't matter how many times you've removed it before, it just keeps happening. I heard you can turn this 'feature' off, but you have to log in with an MS account to do so. No thanks — I exclusively use Teams on the web.
I have similar problems with all the popular apps for video and voice chat: Zoom, Teams, Discord.
There is something very peculiar about it: I can have these apps running with literally no voice or video activity and all costly noise filters turned off, and while the CPU moves between 5-10% (which is still outrageous when nothing is happening), the fan will be running at max, and the battery drains fast.
There is nothing else hogging the CPU, GPU, network etc. in the system, as the process explorer clearly indicates, so there is no reason for the fan and battery to do this.
I keep concluding that there is some hidden process running in the system that causes this, and while I can never prove this, based on some thoughts and discussions by others, and the fact that it happens with video and voice chats, we suspect that advanced analysis on the audio input (voice analysis) is being done whenever the mic is turned on.
For the last 2 years that I've used teams on Linux it has had a constant issue, even across Pulseaudio and Pipewire. If a BT headset is connected when Teams starts it never shows up in the device list.
I always have to killall teams thrice, wait a while for some cache to expire , because otherwise I start Teams and it's still logged in for a few minutes and will disconnect the middle of a call just to logout, and THEN start teams.
And today was another nightmare, people complained about my mic quality, so I did a test call, sounded fine, killall teams thrice, restarted it, reconnected to meeting, sounds fine now. wtf...
And besides that today alone Teams malfunctioned in at least one other way I can't remember now.
So I love that Teams for Linux exists, but damn is it shit.
My co-worker in the same call today also runs Linux but he runs wired so he has no complaints.
Memory is so cheap nowadays. 64GB laptop memory on NewEgg are $149.99. Surely a very easy investment for anyone working in a company that uses Teams. Just refuse to buy laptops with non-upgradable memory.
Having 64GB will solve all performance problems with Teams and other Electron apps.
Writing stuff in C or C++ doesn't give you substantial perf benefits over assembler in most cases, so they don't belong to this list.
That aside, no, I don't think we shouldn't be using higher-level abstractions. The problem is that we're using them without any consideration of performance impact at all, and increasingly without consideration of the actual cost/benefit ratio from developer perspective. For that matter, at some point, if you keep piling abstractions on, the amount of leakage from them all the way to the top layer is a tax on the developer operating on that layer - and that tax can, at some point, exceed the purported benefits of the abstraction.
Do we really need to package a browser with every app just to make it easy to do (horribly designed more often than not) cross-platform UI? Or is it just the most expedient hack to avoid having to solve that problem properly?
Crystal Player did not use ffmpeg. It came with a few codecs bundled, but you'd typically install a codec pack like K-Lite. Anyway building a fast and functional UI is actual hard work, don't know why you'd think otherwise.
To me this happens when the CPU starts throttling due to high temperatures, if you don't have something like menumeters installed it probably won't show itself on any other native Mac GUI.
For a long time the workarounds I've used to deal with this issue:
1) Charge from the ports on the right! The charging circuit on the left aggravates the issue.
2) Disable turbo charge by setting the mac into low power mode inside system preferences -> Battery
3) Raise the computer from the table for increased air flow, and not be in contact with latent warm from the table. Which has been heated by the mac itself.
4) Lower AC temperature
5) Change the Fan Speed from Automatic (default) to fullblast, or make it sensor based but lower the min/max temperatures for the fans to start spinning faster 38-60 celsius
I was having throttling issues with a new 4k monitor. Teams seemed to make the issue worse. Pointing an external USB cabinet fan at the laptop has resolved my issues.
Microsoft Teams is the biggest piece of garbage of a chat software you can ever imagine. Never seen worse, actually considering quitting from the company I'm currently working for because of the daily struggle Teams is causing us. Insanely frustrating.
Back when I had to use teams I would try going on a VC and if Slack was also open, my battery would drain in about 30-45 minutes (on a new-at-the-time MacBook Pro) and be super laggy the whole time.
Ever since then, as long as I’m not presenting, I’ll only call into video calls from an iOS device, regardless of whether we’re using Meet, Teams etc. It’s improved the situation a lot.
Also I always turn off my video feed while others are talking. I never understand why on a call with hundreds of people, they’ll all be constantly uploading their live video stream. Seems wasteful and inefficient, maybe somebody could comment on just how much or little it really is.
I'm going to argue that Teams has replaced Powerpoint as my most hated MS software product.
The only way I now use Teams is from the browser. And even then, as others have said, I keep a prepared Zoom link ready in case everything goes to s*t.
Once I used Microsoft Office lens on iPhone for scanning some documents. It was absolutely confusing to use for a multipage document. It took me ages to figure out. After finishing that 10-12 page document, I had to upload on a HR website. However , it failed as total scan size was like ~100MB so above size limit. So I had to rescan whole thing with notes app in iPhone which finished in few min with only ~10MB of scanned document.
Sure, there would be a detailed 100 pages of document on how to properly use it. But as a normal user I found it stunningly crappy, confusing and inefficient for my usage.
There is a process (can't remember the name) that is kicked in when the temperature reaches a certain level. The job of this process is to turn down the processor. Unfortunately it consumes more more process time when it does this because it preempts everything. So the temperature goes up, which creates more interruptions and so on and so on.
The core reason is that the temperature sensor is just next to the power supply and so is kicking in too early.
The solution - unplug the mac. Let it cool down completely and then run it with the power plugged in on the other side.
I run Teams 24/7 on both my current M1 Pro and old i9 for the last 3 years without "killing" my Mac. Yes the fans on the i9 ran when in a meeting not now on my M1. I use constantly and works well for our business for so many different things.
It has steadily improved over time and performs pretty well as they have gone to newer electron versions and moved over to react from angular.
Apple Silicon native supported is in beta and makes things even better for my M1.
Safari is much more of a problem currently eating up 10+ gigs of ram over time "killing" my Mac requires a restart of safari to free up.
I know teams was originally written on classic AngularJS, and was supposedly undertaking a significant rewrite in order to resolve performance and maintainability problems. Anyone aware if this was ever completed?
It may happen eventually but they have no incentive to make it so. They've captured a significant part of the corporate market by bundling with O365 for Enterprise. Teams has fulfilled it's purpose just as Office did. At least Office is decent software.
Office is nice, as long as they dont hide Desktop downloaders on their website and try to force you to use their Web version which is like 1/3 of real desktop office.
I don't know WHAT you people are smoking. The use of Teams at my company was so successful that IT leadership partnered with Microsoft reps to relaunch the product so that it could be even MORE successful. I don't know about you, but my favorite part is the forced clearing of chat history after 24 hours, and I really appreciate that Microsoft has become so successful by giving job-justifying IT managers at Fortune-sized companies such fine-grained "security" controls over how their product is used internally.
Tangentially related but Teams also bricked my phone.
Long story short: I didn't want to run Teams on my laptop as it was draining the battery super-fast, and I didn't want to install a work account on my private phone either, so I bought a cheap Chinese phone just for teams. It worked fine for 6 months just getting warmer a bit during meetings. But then I had a marathon of 3 meetings one after another and at some point it turned off and never turned on again. I bought another phone but now I make sure to turn incoming video off during calls.
Funny thing: I use Teams on an i9 MacBook Pro 16" and _HAD_ this problem.
The issue is that if an i9 overheats, the ONLY symptom is that the CPU slows down and you will never know this happened. No report about heat is generated.
For me, the issue happened with Teams plus an External Monitor. An External Monitor lights up the discrete GPU and then it didn't take much CPU usage to push the system into slowdown mode.
Fix was a Genius Bar appointment to have them open and vacuum dust from inside the 2 year-old MacBook Pro. It's back to being perfect.
I'm rapidly losing faith in Teams and Microsoft, I've been playing with powerapps to have a function that adds a teams comment to Onenote to track actions that come in through chat. So far at least half the time the page generates in Onenote but doesn't sync any content, when it does sync the link back to the chat crashes Teams 100% of the time. Have tried the same link into email and that crashes Teams too.
I'm curious if anyone here on an M1 has tried installing the iPad/iOS version on their computer. I've done this for some badly misbehaving apps (Slack for example) and found it to be a significant improvement in performance, even if some interactions don't work as well.
Caveat: It may require jumping through some hoops to load on a Mac and some infosec policies may stop you from using it.
Curious if I had a similar usage of resources. My experience hasn't been impacted, and I use Teams all day every day. The Activity Monitor line item for Microsoft Teams was not concerning ( 566MB of memory), but then searching for "Teams" showed a total of 5.4 GB of memory consumption for various Teams processes. Not cool.
I've experienced this but with Slack. Slack always used to bog down my computer and randomly disconnect. My news company uses Teams and I've had very limited problems with it. The search on Teams though is genuinely awful and you can't find anything especially the context it's in. It's terrible.
They're using an i9 16" Macbook Pro. I don't mean to split hairs here, but if there's a single modern Mac advocate who will say that it's not a hardware issue then I suggest idling one of those machines with Safari open. You'll have no problem rocketing past 45c with barely anything open!
Every laptop I've used runs far above 45C. As far as I can tell, Laptops are expected to run around 60-80C.
My Intel Mac Laptops frequently go into the 90C range. As far as I've been able to tell, that's expected. Back in 2008, my Macbook Pro would run into that range with no problems. I remember looking at the CPU specs and Apple was using CPUs with higher than average temperature tolerance.
Beyond thermal throttling, I don't see what harm it would be to run a CPU hot. They are expected to run hot and automatically throttle to keep heat in the designed range. It's not an emergency mechanism that kicks in to avoid CPU damage.
Really? That should be a sign that your OS or hardware is malfunctioning. Intel CPUs (particularly everything post-Haswell) can idle just fine under 30c. Certain chips can even get near-ambient temps if you pull the clock speed down to S0 sleep mode. If your laptop turns on, with nothing open, and hits 45 degrees Celsius, I think there's an issue with the cooling system. That, or you own a G3 Powerbook.
Macs in general have really strange thermal profiles. I don't think a single one of my Linux machines, laptop or desktop, has ever peaked 70c in a sustained workload. The only time I ever consistently hit that temp range is with my Macbook, when it's compiling something or plugged into a 5k monitor.
> Beyond thermal throttling, I don't see what harm it would be to run a CPU hot. They are expected to run hot and automatically throttle to keep heat in the designed range. It's not an emergency mechanism that kicks in to avoid CPU damage.
Well, yes, there is a risk of damage running chips at ~90c. Intel chips have a junction temp of around ~95-105c, once it reaches that range the silicon will cut power to the chip to avoid risking damage and to force the component to begin cooling off. Sustaining higher temps for burst workloads is fairly negligible, but running your machine hot all the time will eventually take a toll on the internal storage and memory (doubly so if you're using an SOC like M1).
I used to use various video chat programs on an original Athlon 64. It worked just fine. There is really no excuse for video meetings to work so poorly on a modern-ish laptop.
IIRC Google Talk or Chat or whatever it was called (the XMPP product that worked quite well) had some video support, and there was even a degree of their party client support.
I remember... I had half dozen chat clients open, 100+ open tabs in Mozilla Phoenix browser, editors with large projects open for weeks,... compiling, building kernels, running SQL servers, running multiple window VMs, ... all with 100-200 day uptimes. This was back in 2004-2006. AMD Athlon 64, RHEL 3. 512mb of ram... dual 19" LCD displays.
I had one for work and it would get so hot that it would freeze just browsing with a few browsing tabs and Teams open. Not every single time but enough to be annoying. Fastest spec laptop I have ever owned and also the slowest.
An Intel i9 will always dispatch an absurd amount of heat. The real advantage a MBP has over a lot of Windows systems is that the MBP has a full metal case so the fans can run on silent and divert all the heat away, while a Windows i9 laptop made out of plastic will always have the fans blaring.
Well, it doesn't really feel like an advantage when the palmrest's surface temp is hot enough to cook pork. Even Windows will do a fairly good job of keeping laptop thermals in a more comfortable 70-80c range, but Macbooks are the only devices I've seen that will push themselves so close to the tJunction temp of the chip. It must be some absurd MacOS performance ramping decision, I've found that leaving my machine in Low Power Mode will at least prevent it from cooking my hands when I just want to work on a VM.
That's not entirely true, some macbooks actually have insulation between heat generating parts and the chassis so that the user doesn't get burnt. The maximum acceptable temperature of the chassis is actually quite low, in the 40°C range.
Moreover, it's simply a bad choice for a laptop that doesn't have the cooling to support it. There's plenty of devices out there with a chassis thick enough to support a chip like that (Lenovo and HP have shipped Xeon laptops for years), but a Macbook isn't one of them. Even the lower-end Intel chips ended up getting undervolted to run comfortably in a Macbook chassis, I don't know what Apple was thinking when they put a workstation CPU in an Ultrabook form factor.
I don't think it was malice, it was probably just an honest mistake. Apple comes out with a larger laptop than the 15", and Intel comes out with a processor better than the i7: as an engineer, you can put 2 and 2 together. I totally see how they'd think that a larger version of their i5 laptop could handle the i9. Apple's cooling is designed around low-wattage chips though, and those i9s are consuming much more power than an i7 for much less relative performance scaling. It also didn't help that they were keen on marketing it as a new-age mobile workstation, which was really not the case for a lot of daily users.
The whole thing came together to create a disappointing product. Pretty much the only saving grace of those machines was their really-good Bootcamp performance, but it was no reason to pay $3,000+ for one.
I don't personally think it was malice. More a part of the stream of form over function decisions that lead to losing the ports, the years-long keyboard debacle, stagelight display failures, etc.
I think I still haven't found a message/phone/video app that works.
Skype is extremely buggy (crashes, freezes, regular ui bugs, loses conversations, etc). Teams is a resource hog, and is hard to search. Symphony is great for chat, but unpleasant for phone calls.
I'm a bit surprised, since I'd expect it to be a solved problem.
I've had a good experience with Discord. At work we use it as our primary voice communication software, and it hardly ever has issues with audio quality. Screen sharing is also configurable, which is good as you can better decide where your bitrate goes.
Sure, it's still Electron, but as far as Electron apps go, it's pretty responsive. Uses about 500MB RAM even on my personal account with literally hundreds of joined communities, some of them with thousands to tens of thousands of members.
It also doesn't drop notifications and the read indicators are not insane.
I still prefer Slack's text chat for business use, mainly because threads are frictionless to create, while on Discord they are more like "temporary sub-channels" where you still need to give them titles. But it's otherwise pretty good, and it has GFM-style highlighted code formatting.
A tell that Teams and HN users mostly are Americans. The biggest problem with Teams is that the volume is too low. Every other service has some sort of volume normalization. Teams still expects mainly loud mouths! Every Teams meeting has this talk louder segment. Does not happen with huddle, meet, zoom and so on.
I had a contracting gig at MSFT a few years ago. I remember one occasion where I voiced some gripes about using Teams with some FTEs I worked with and receiving nothing but blank stares. I couldn’t believe they didn’t find Teams as frustrating as I did. Maybe they were just used to using crappy MSFT tech?
Not sure if electron is the issue, I believe vscode is based on it (I may be mistaken). Really wish they would sort Teams out.
I like the concepts and product, but when in a video chat I have to close most apps. I tried opening a JIRA ticket whilst on a video call the other day... my quads still have the scars
Interestingly, it works well on windows 11. Using it cca. 8-10 hours a day very actively and never really had any big issues, I recall maybe an issue of joining a meeting once in the past 2 years.
However it's a very different experience for my mac-user colleagues.
Not solved yet. I still struggle a lot with Teams. Ended up using the browser version instead. Used fine until today. Suddenly camera was not working and laaaagg. This is bad. Google Hangout and Zoom work fine. Since years...
This is a strange thread for me. I have a 2021 16" Macbook pro. I use Teams every day, and have some long meetings. The memory use is about 1Gb. I have no issues with it. It is snappy and performant.
Teams crashed on my Mac when I was interviewing at Microsoft. In 3 interviews. Funny enough nobody understood my issue, but if you think about it only a small minority of folks have non windows computers in MS.
After reading this I uninstalled teams on my Mac and a bunch of annoyances have ended. The main one, the text on tabs in sublime text are no longer distorted. This alone was driving me crazy for months
You can use Teams in chrome on Mac and it works fine. I'd never let that tech touch my Mac. I have no clue how MS forced so many people to use that app but I'm glad my team uses something else.
Thankfully the 1.4 version of teams is still available on Linux. That version actually works on my system. If I install a 1.5 release, I can use teams for 25 seconds, and then it crashes.. and restarts, so I can get another 25 seconds, and the cycle just continually repeats.
Teams is an Electron app. Hardly the first in line with poor performance. Why there is no better option than Electron in 2022 for cross platform UI apps is a mystery. (VSCode is a fork…)
When I need to use Teams I just have it on my iPad and use universal control. My iPad basically turns into a Teams terminal during certain hours of the day.
For me (2019 16-inch MBP, i9, 64 GB RAM) Teams in normal operations is no problem... but for some reason, when involved in large video calls, it will hog the dGPU during the call (probably for transcoding the streams) but not release it, which makes the battery go empty faster than a Porsche's tank on a German highway...
If you ever notice blaring fans after a video call, open Activity Monitor and check if the GPU indicator in the Energy tab says High Performance or Integrated, and if the former, sort by "GPU" column to see which app is hogging it.
I ran into something similar. 2019 15” MBP, i9, 16gb
Video calls while using an external monitor (40” Dell), particularly when screen sharing, dramatically slow the machine down. Enough to render it unusable during the call and for a little while afterwards. Not an issue I recall hitting in Zoom or WebEx.
I disconnect my external monitor while taking Teams calls now.
The reason may be having a second screen attached. As soon as you have, the Macbook will always enable the dGPU - probably because Apple saved a couple dozen bucks for a displayport matrix chip so that the TB controllers' DP inputs could also be served by the iGPU.
They recently changed something in Teams (I first noticed at the beginning of June) - now if you don't move your mouse for 5 mins it automatically marks you 'idle' and...stops receiving messages. Then when you move the mouse all the messages people sent while you were idle arrive at once.
If you don't run it on your main machine this becomes pretty annoying pretty fast, and there doesn't seem to be an option anywhere to change 'mark me idle after' time
At my previous job I had to tell people to completely ignore my status and presume I'm marked as online because I couldn't get it to stop marking me as Away. I'd be programming for a couple hours, only to realize I had been marked as away that entire time.
I find the auto idle exceedingly frustrating - sometimes it doesn't kick in, sometimes it kicks in very quickly. Sometimes i have to restart the whole application to get it to flip back to Available.
They seem to have a strategy to make every feature worse over time. For a long time voice calls worked well but it seems their feature worsening strategy has finally reached voice calls and I constantly have people drop off or bad voice quality.
It's a glorified chat program. Why does it need a top-of-the-line computer from last year for ?
My experience with Teams is that it uses by itself about double the RAM the rest of the entire operating systems is using (and that includes a web browser and a office suite).
They've recently used tricks to reduce the RAM usage, such as practically unloading the entire "tab" (in the Chromium sense) when the window is not focused, but this leads to out-of-date information in the window (such as presence status) whenever it is not focused.
Teams is the definition of what's wrong with microsoft
Nobody gives a shit anymore at that company
I keep say the same shit, but nothing changes, they have major culture and hiring problems, at this point i'm not sure "major" is enough to describe how horrible it is
They fire random people, and keep the problematic seeds, worse, they reward them!
Does teams use more CPU/Ram resources than it should ... definitely.
Does the Apple MBP i9 laptops have terrible performance under load ... definitely.
Any number of things (compiling, crashplan backups, video conf teams/zoom/bluejean, etc) causes the CPU load to spike, the laptop to get too hot, fans spin up loudly, and huge thermal throttling that continues until the system is idle for awhile.
Should a video chat client, running on a computer with hardware video encoders, make the computer work as hard as compelling software, or scanning compressing and transmitting the entire hard drive?
I think this is all on Microsoft's shoulders. I have an M1 Max machine, an i9 machine and a PC with an i7 and Teams runs equally horribly on all platforms. I would say that I have "less" issues on the M1 Max but I don't think it has anything to do with the machine itself other than it's more powerful than the others so can handle it.
No. I’m on a state of the art M1 Max and it takes 20-30 seconds to start Teams. About 15-30 seconds to join a meeting. On my intel mbp it was even worse.
Any other app loads near instantly (aside from Affinity Photo, which I expect).
If there’s a fault in Teams for Mac it’s either due to incompetent design/implementation or maliciousness.
I think you're more out of touch here, though. Apple did have a number of iterations that used outdated chips, but IIRC the 16" i9 was part of the generation that finally caught up with the rest of the high-end market before they crushed the competition with the M1. Those definitely weren't slow by any realistic metric and I don't think there was that much competition at this level of portability.
Lets not pretend that people actually are willingly making the tradeoff of some performance for portability when it comes to Macbooks. Many, many technically minded people are convinced that Macbooks are the best performing laptops there are, completely oblivious to physical laws surrounding heat transfer.
Meanwhile, the crowd that builds their desktops up from scratch seems to be well aware of this.
I'm sure most "technically-minded" people will be well aware that a desktop would offer better performance. I'm equally sure portability does play a big role in taking or issuing a laptop for most people. Kinda hard to take a desktop along for wfh days or travel...
Besides, the Apple Silicon ones do come out first in tons of benchmarks and the thermals of the 16" ones have received a lot of praise. There may be some desktop-in-a-laptop-shell monsters that outperform them, but for most workloads a 16" M1 Max should be very hard to beat. I have a M1 Pro from work and it's a beast, does a bunch of stressful things a lot faster than my built-from-scratch desktop (not brand new but also not ancient). Maybe read up on Apple silicon and Macbook thermals, a lot has changed since 2018.
My honest complaint isn't even with the Macbooks. They are not that bad, just overpriced, unless you consider the "enjoyment" (a.k.a vanity) of a product aesthetics worth spending money on. In the same way many people buy performance sports cars only to drive at speed limit 99% of the time. Besides thermal throttling, there are plenty of issues afoot that simply don't exist compared to a laptop with well supported linux hardware running a lightweight distro.
The problem is that the general myth of them being "top tier", which solely comes from aesthetics because they will fail any comparable real world use case test against comparable options, causes them to be so prevalent with developers. Take every single Amazon developer for instance - each of them has a private VM "dev-desktop" for development, because while all the services people develop run on AWS in a Linux environment, they want to be an attractive employer and bling out their developers with an MBP.
So now instead of the correct solution of just issuing everyone Linux laptops (and before you say that its not a reliable solution, consider that you are saying that a company that built and runs the behemoth that is AWS can't hire competent dev ops/it to provision Linux on developer laptops), they waste way more resources, internal tooling sucks (they have a tool that basically rsyncs directories over ssh just so you can develop on your mac), and causes additional issues due to incompatibility of some JNI native libraries, case sensitivity of the file system, e.t.c.
First, the specs on the Intel MBP weren't even top of the line. You could get laptops with slighyl higher spec CPUs, and much better discrete graphics like the 2080 that blew the AMD graphics in MBPs out of the water.
Secondly, and most importantly, having a powerful chip, in a small chassis without adequate cooling = hard thermal throttling.
The M1 chips are an upgrade on top of this with much less power draw for same performance, however both M1 Air and Pro still throttle, and M2 will throttle most likely more.
If you want top of the line performance in a laptop, you have to buy one of those bulky ones with very loud fans, and expect that running at full performance on battery will drain the battery quickly There is no way around this. And to call those machines "laptops" is really a misnomer even, considering that its almost painful having them on your lap due to the heat.
Not every single word has to be read 100% literally every time you read it. It is a very powerful laptop. In the top .5% of laptops purchased in the year it was purchased, most likely. It does not have to literally be the most powerful laptop a person can buy. I think everyone reading that sentence understood that but you.
Do you understand what thermal throttling means? It means your powerful-on-paper computer becomes just as powerful as a much lower priced computer.
And that is also assuming that the rest of the computer is good. Lets not forget the horrendous touchbar, the multitude of bugs in the OS, the lack of ports and hubs that have issues and in some cases end up frying the smc, shoddy external monitor compatibility and so on.
Issues that my much cheaper laptop that is running linux does not have.
> Do you understand what thermal throttling means?
Yes. Don't patronize me.
You're, presumably intentionally, missing the point of what I and everyone who has responded to you is saying.
I am going to exit the conversation because it is clear that you're not interested in actually understanding what anyone is trying to explain to you about how people typically communicate with one another.
I'd like to remind you that this conversation was not about how "powerful" a given laptop is, but rather about how people talk about things in relation to one another and how people tend to speak to one another colloquially.
1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on your Mac
2. Log into https://teams.microsoft.com
3. Click ... > Apps > Install this site as an app
This will create an Edge app for Teams that uses almost no resources but has feature parity with the regular Microsoft Teams app.
We tell all of our students to do this, and it has solved all Microsoft Teams performance issues on student Macs (both Intel and Apple Silicon).