Forum Discussion
Teams is KILLING my Mac Every Day
I have a hard time believing I'm the first person to post this after not finding anything in the forum. I wouldn't doubt if Microsoft is deleting them because they can't figure out how to fix this issue. I can Google this issue and come up with numerous results but NOTHING has been able to fix this issue except for completely removing Teams all together, which unfortunately is not an option for me.
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 but Microsoft is slowly killing it with Teams. It causes serious lags and randomly decides when it wants to share the screen successfully. Other times, it just shows screen but no audio or vice versa. It's infuriating and I've lost my patience!
For context, I just re-installed my entire OS thinking it was an OS issue. I erased the entire drive and started from scratch. I did not do any kind of restore from backup. Everything was a fresh install yesterday.
I joined a teams meeting today in front of 100 people and Teams seemed to be running fine until I went to share screen and then everything choked. Those who were showing video on the call started flickering rapidly, which could have caused an epileptic seizure - it's that bad and I'm not joking, this isn't funny. IT'S VERY IRRITATING! My entire system. Mail, Calendar, Finder, and Preview (all Apple Apps, which should run super fast) started running like garbage with lags between 5 and 10 seconds - that's no joke. Upon reboot, it was normal again until I ran Teams for another meeting... reboot.
I firmly believe Teams is a virus and the developers should be fired for ignoring this issue. I've been dealing with this issue for nearly a year. Teams always causes some kind of lag issue whenever I run it. I have to reboot my machine to get my computer to work somewhat normal again. This is ridiculous!
I found an MS article mentioning how Teams uses memory because of this Chromium feature due to easier development. I don't care about the ease of development. I CARE about it working and NOT DELAYING MY PRODUCTIVITY. Forget Chromium!
Earlier this year, MS announced they were going to have a new and improved version in April 2021. I think two version have been released since then - None of them have solved this issue.
Is anyone at Microsoft Listening?!?!?!
Hi everyone, we're pleased to announce Microsoft Teams for Apple Silicon, which on the M1/M2 ARM builds, will have significantly faster performance than what's seen during the Rosetta emulation today! Here's our official roadmap ID for this release; Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365. More on this can be found here; Announcing Microsoft Teams optimized for Apple silicon - Microsoft Tech Community.
Users should see a significant performance boost with this release. And for the Intel Macs out there, we're still thinking about you! We have some large performance fixes coming that will help improve overall performance for the Intel version as well.
Thanks,
Sam Cosby, Teams Engineering PM
242 Replies
- Same for me: I use a MacBook Pro 16" I9, and it's lo laggy if I use teams. Working from home is essential and it drains my energy every day. I tried every setting: no way.
- I'm experiencing the same issue on my macbook pro. When I join video calls via Teams the CPU usage on my mac increases. It increases to the point that my entire macbook slows down and I'm not able to access other apps while Teams Video is running.
shilocase I'm experiencing these symptoms on daily basis. Today, the situation was so unbearable, that I tried to google a bit and seemingly found a solution that worked for me.
In my experience, MS Teams is one the most demanding app that I've ever run on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015, 3,1 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1867 MHz DDR3) - using the CPU regularly up to 50 % for a lenghty period is no exception. Affinity suite, Final Cut Pro X or even Half-Life 2 games have never done this to me...
Along with that, my setup includes external Apple Thunderbolt Display. I usually keep MacBook's lid closed and also the computer is in plastic protective case. I've noticed that when Teams starts to "kill" my MacBook, the fan runs also at high speeds. So I figured out that the system may be overheated and simply throttles CPU performance in order to cool itself down (https://appletoolbox.com/check-if-mac-is-thermal-throttling/).
After opening the lid, removing the bottom part of the protective case and opening window to the outside (to let some cool air in), the MacBook returned back to normal operational performance within about 10 minutes. Fan slowed down, system is responsive again. Including Teams meetings with video and screen sharing
I believe that M1 MacBooks have better CPU / temperature / cooling management so the symptoms usually won't appear on these machines. That being said, I'm still convinced that MS Teams really deserves some serious optimalizations.
Hope this helps...
The electron framework is the issue and the fact that its several major versions behind. MS teased us with upgraded electron which would of fixed a majority of these performance issues and left us hanging. I am looking forward to the next major outage to push slack and zoom because they are reliable AND dont literally bend $3000 computer over every day trying to just exist.
Lojza3D it's a good reminder that overheating laptops slow down (and it eventually wears them out before their time).
I wish that fixing the Teams issues on mac could be that simple.I'm trying running Teams inside a parallels virtual windows OS, rather than native on my mac, to see if that helps. I'll report my findings here in a week or two.
- As previously mentioned I did exactly the same thing and the experience is a lot better.
They just don't care about Mac users.
shilocase I've experienced this as well - it also seems to lag even more when you have Sharepoint documents open in Office Apps. I have to reboot daily - sometimes multiple times while force quitting apps to do so because I'm seeing a beach ball and Office Apps won't close after a few hours of meetings in Teams and working in Office. My computer is painfully slow and my device is the prioritized device on my home network with fiber speeds. Even in video calls, my video will often stop and get lost.
I never have had these issues with Zoom and my productivity in Office has decreased greatly since we went exclusively to Teams for video calls. I spend at least 2-4 hours each week doing extra work trying to close and shut down apps/documents to reboot (often forced reboots) while working in Teams. It's probably the exact opposite of what creators intended when they connected Teams to all the Office apps. It's also a very frustrating user experience.
I'm testing a solution suggestion from another forum: in MS Teams Settings - under General, there's a setting "Disable GPU hardware acceleration (requires restarting Teams)". The suggestion is that this needs to be checked.
I didn't have a chance to test it yet during calls due to the holidays, but I'm giving it a try.
Andrea_N I have already tried that, it doesn't change anything, still hammers my MacBook.
- It worked for me, I don't have the problem since I changed this setting.
- I'm sorry if this has been addressed in the comments. the crappy forum software doesn't seem to have the ability to search within a thread -- or at least I couldn't find it.
Has anyone tried running teams in a virtual machine, that is running windows, on their mac? I wonder if that would fix the issues. but I'd certainly love to hear from someone who already tried it, before I spend money on a VMware license, and then a Windows license, and then spend the hours setting it all up... I just want to support this request and add my experience: MS Teams app on Mac OS is unusable. Everything that other Mac users shared here is true. I'm Mac user and I have to use MS Teams for chatting, meeting, phone calls, etc for work purposes (corp decision) and the experience is so bad that I had to purchase a Windows Laptop for using Teams while I keep using Mac for other tasks (imagine my day to day working with 2 laptops). Please fix it as soon as possible, we will be very grateful.
Thanks in advance.
Same here. Machine becomes unusable in a teams call of any size. Interestingly the call will start of fine. But then after a few seconds to a few minutes other peoples video starts flickering and everything becomes sluggish then unusable. I swear this wasn't a problem 6+ months ago though.
- Interestingly I switched to default theme and switched off GPU acceleration and now it's usable. It's still bad but it is actually usable. But I have no way of knowing if what I changed made any difference and I have no desire to test it as it's finally usable.
I’ve read this entire thread and I’m not sure if I should be happy knowing my company is not the only one facing this crazy issue or if I should cry as it looks like there’s no solution apart maybe from spending $$$ in M1 based MacBooks (not even working well for everyone as far as I can read).
We’ve been working almost 100% remote since March 2020 and Teams is the corporate meeting solution for the +7000 employees. Even if I’m facing the same as what has been described here on my MacBook Pro since day one we switched from slack to Teams, I would like to add that colleagues using only Windows 10 laptops are also affected by some slowness, lag, search issues even if it’s with lower impact.
I’m also using a Dell laptop with Windows 10 just for important meetings where I’m presenting to large audience but having two devices on the desk and not being able to copy paste some codes or share a terminal windows while in a call simply because your main device is the Mac and you attend the meeting on the Windows is annoying and frustrating.
Not even mentioning the search feature that finds your search string in old messages but doesn’t allow to go to this particular message and you have to scroll, sometimes a year of discussion because the only information you got from the search is the date and time the searched string was found.
Not mentioning the spell checker (I switch between french and english all day long) that unlike other applications, only underlines the mistakes without any proposition to quickly correct it.
Some days, while sharing screen or simply attending meetings while I need to quickly react in chat section and the lag leads me to miss it, I could barely throw my computer out the window !
sbriggs This describes my situation too. After a minute or so the video starts juddering, the video panel starts flickering, everything bogs down, typing in the chat window becomes delayed. Today the audio was affected too with voices obscured by a repetitive noise ("buzzing" at 3 or 4 times per second). I left it and the problems mostly went away after 5 minutes but it does keep happening. I also didn't see this happening before December (though Teams has always absolutely hammered my CPU and battery life).
- I'm going to try running an Azure Virtual Desktop, with teams in it, to see if that helps. Happily I am the CTO at work, so I can spend this money and tell the MSP set it up without having to beg too many people for permission. I'll report if it works or not.
- I have the same problem. It was already bad with my MacBook Air, but nothing has changed with my new MacBook Pro (2021 M1, 32GB): MS Teams reboots in the middle of calls, and audio issues are extremely frequent, many times I cannot hear anything from what others are saying for about 30 seconds. I came here hoping that there's a solution because with my laptop's performance this shouldn't be a problem... Is there a resolution that already exists? Many thanks.
- For the moment, the "solution" is to use the web-version of MS Teams with limited functionality.
Hey everyone,
So sorry to see you all having the same issues I'm having.
It's still going berserk when using the app but have a few tips that might make you live a bit easier, especially for your macbook.
- don't turn on your camera, this seems to save quite some CPU usage. Preferred if everyone else keeps their cameras turned off as well.
- of course try to limit other processes, but as I work with online data I rely heavily on Chrome making that near impossible and the need to share screen often.
- What works best though. Use the web-app on Chrome. With this it seems that I can manage the best and even the fan sometimes doesn't make any noice at all. I think this is the case since it was built on a Chrome platform.
some cons with this approach though:
Background noice isn't reduced/filtered anymoreYou're not able to use background filters for your camera, which is a nuisance since I work in my makeshift office/closet
When sharing screen, you're not able to also have your camera on (I wonder why... but don't mind so much)
I think it's less practical having it somewhere in a tab/window compared to just switching to a designated app
Have also tried this on Safari, for this you need to disable "prevent cross-site tracking" in privacy settings, otherwise it doesn't run. Funny enough, it does say on the page that downloading the app will provide a better experience, yeah right.
All in all, wouldn't recommend this as it seems to be just as bad using the app. At least Safari has the courtesy to notify me that the page is consuming a lot of energy and that closing this tab makes you Macbook more responsive, lol.
Cheers and hope an update will soon fix our troubles.
StefGramser024 It's a bit upsetting the only countermeasures so far include buying a 2K+ Mac book pro, turning off cameras etc. I guess MS wants everyone to work on Windows rather than Mac. Can it be more obvious...?
MacAttack1465 Not really, the Windows users forum have more or less the same amount of issues as us mac users.
I wanted to point out that turning off the camera completely defeats the purpose of using a video call client.
