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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
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...
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 1434 ms ] threadThe 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.
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).
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
I've missed soooo many notifications because of this garbage I have to remember to manually go check it.
Didn't occur to me that 'idle' would cause messages to stop coming in
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.
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.
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.
Teams is an impressively awful product
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).
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...
Also: how can you provide a wiki module that’s not searchable?
Teams feels to me like it’s thrown together by a bunch of interns that are learning Agile. Keep changing things without any strategy.
In fact, it doesn't even reliably receive messages. At times there are days of delay from the message being sent to me receiving it.
Anyway, no two people seem to have similar experiences with the application...
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 hate Teams. So much.
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.
Mind, it could be worse. It could be Webex.
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).
Superb. 0/10 software.
Teams is an absolutely garbage app and platform....on a good day
Off-topic but I need to get this off my chest: Outlook on the web is a much better experience than the native app on the Mac.
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.
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.
No it doesn’t.
Video calls are worse than Skype or Google meets.
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.
crashes all the time. I actually had a better experience with it on Mac more often than Windows.
The Windows people have WAY more issues. The Mac experience isn't great but not nearly as bad as the Windows users.
using the msedge webapp i _only_ bloat to about 2GB.
edit: on my win10 machine
I'm using a surface laptop 3. Maybe MS did the apple thing of making software that only works properly on their own hardware
As another said, the dismissing of notifications is onerous.
But I have no issues with performance, and no apparent bugginess either.
No Surface here - custom AMD Ryzen / AMD Radeon desktop. Windows 10 Pro.
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?
It feels like it…
As an aside though, on Surface it was Google Meet that destroyed performance. I repeatedly got overheating warnings while in meetings.
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.
Damn, what a piece of junk!
From what I can figure this is kind of inherent when apps are electron based to be cross-platform. Similar experience with vscode.
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.
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.
Slack, which is also an incredible pos, feels snappy and lightweight in comparison.
The video chat is less terrible than it’s worst parts. Managing documents through it is just gross.
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?
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.
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.
Seems like about half the blame is Apple's.
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.
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).
[0]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftedge/forum/all/...
For PWAs (web apps that do additional things to make them work more like apps) there may also be a simpler install button in the url bar itself
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/teams-phone-f...
(or even better, don't use Teams at all, obviously)
Any idea how to get notification badges to work (if possible)?
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.
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?"
The troubleshooter and report forms both crash on opening.
I guess that's one way to hit a "zero negative feedback" KPI!
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.
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.
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'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.
[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-m...
and launch daemon (`com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist` in `/Library/LaunchDaemons`)
This was a pile of steaming shit from the get-go.
See https://github.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-msinternal/blob/...
See the "osx-x64 + osx-arm64" builds.
That's seriously the understatement of the past 8 months. which is about as long as I've been trying to find this (unsuccessfully).
Anyway, thank you!
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..
You had me up until here. It is pretty amazing how slow "modern" chat apps run.
If we want to split hairs then Edge is slightly better purely because it doesn't have the same 65% market share as Chrome.
Is there a real use case for seeing more than 25 users' video feeds at a time?
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...
I find it hard to conceptualize these apps as little more than your browser, but ever so slightly more pointed
If you are the type to have a ton of tabs open across many windows, this also makes the "app" easier to spot.
You can also pin the app to the taskbar and have it launch with Windows.
The more minified window sounds useful on my Linux installation, things like Slack randomly fall behind on Electron and stop working
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.
It's done by design to try and force more people to use their app store, where apple can take a cut of everything it can.
Just wondering if teams flat out refuses to work on Safari.
(Only time I use teams is when someone sends me a meeting link. I just run it on the browser. I use Void Linux btw)
Yes. Every other office app works, just not teams.
1. That when I close outlook (this doesn't happen on teams), and open it again, I need to put my password, it doesn't stay logged in.
2. That whenever I open teams or outlook, an empty Edge stays on as a different window.
Any solutions?
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft needs to fix teams asap
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?
There are some apps that get the performance & UX quality standards and some that don't.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125532/microsoft-new-on...
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.
>Teams is murdering my MacBook Pro 16" i9 with 16GB RAM every day. This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time
Its quite surprising how supposedly tech people are actually out of touch with tech.
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.
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.
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.
Have a great day.
Meanwhile, the crowd that builds their desktops up from scratch seems to be well aware of this.
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.
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.
How in the hell does it performs worse as a native application than google meets does inside the browser on a 10 years older piece of hardware?
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.
Wait. Teams is using the original version of Angular JS to serve as the UI framework?
This is substantial news to me. Certainly would explain everything.
The amount of technological shame I am witnessing continues to grow without bound. Microsoft is worth how much money on the open market?
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.
Sucks getting old doesn't it?
That’s not to say Angular.js can’t be used for apps that complex! It’s just a lot easier to get it wrong compared to more modern frameworks.
https://teams.microsoft.com/
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.