Forum Discussion
Teams is KILLING my Mac Every Day
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
MicrosoftHi there shilocase - this is Sam Cosby from Microsoft Teams PM Engineering. I specifically look after performance for the desktop client E2E through feedback. I understand your frustration here, especially if you're having this issue during some of your important meetings. I can assure you that there's significant work going on from our side to review any and all performance related issues from both Mac/Windows/Web areas to ensure improvement. To dig further in your comment, I'll separate out your issues to help you further;
1. Powerful Mac device having issues with Teams: From what it sounds like in your verbatim below, this looks to be more/less affiliated with meetings in Teams. There are some significant improvements going into the current generation of the client, especially on the meetings side. Can you validate this is where you're seeing most of your performance issues on Teams for Mac? Are you seeing performance issues when outside of a meeting? I'd love to hear some additional examples you're seeing to ensure we have the right folks looking into this.
2. "Teams uses memory because of Chromium" - we're actually getting away from this in our next generation client, because we know there are some shortcomings due to this. The timeline is still aways away, but we're all in on this.
I promise we're listening - and we won't delete your message. We want to ensure that what we're delivering is top-grade, so hearing this makes us want to dig in further to give you the best experience possible. Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Best,
Sam
Hi Sam Cosby, thank you for your reply.
I've attached a video of the flickering. This was a month ago and still persists. It seems to be getting worse. But reducing the size of the Teams window so the video feeds are smaller reduces the flicker. I have Xfinity internet which boast 1gb burst speeds and when I've tested it, it always comes around 200MB/second.
The reality of running Teams on this computer is I have to shut down most every app to get it run at a reasonable pace and more often than not reboot after using Teams for my computer to recover. While I run Teams, I have to shut down my Apple apps like Mail, Finder, Calendar because they start to lag too and it causes even more delay in Teams opening and responding to commands.
The performance issues I've experienced are a seriously long lag times 5-20 seconds (easily) throughout the entire use of it. Opening the app takes forever, opening a meeting takes forever to populate the screen that allows me to turn on/off the camera/microphone before joining the meeting takes forever. Upon joining the meeting, that takes forever, bringing up the share options dialog box takes forever, once clicking on the Share button, it takes several clicks for it to respond to the option I selected. Because of the lag, I've lost confidence that when I select an option, the App actually acknowledges it, especially disconnecting, and as a result, buttons get clicked multiple times causing even more delay. Sometimes I have to command Q to leave meetings because "End Meeting" doesn't respond. It's like the button is decorative. These delays accumulate to about 45-60 seconds from the time I open Teams to when I can actually connect into a meeting. Leaving is quick if I just Command Q or Command-option escape and force quit Teams. I have no patience for waiting on the app to figure itself out anymore. However the worst was of all these delays was over three minutes from the time I opened the app to when I actually was joined into the meeting but that was the prior version (June 2021 - I think) to the one I'm running now, Version 1.4.00.16567 on Mac OSX Big Sur 11.6.
Again, when Teams failed me in the meeting yesterday in front of 100 people, before that, I was stoked to see Teams opening up quickly, popped me right in to the meeting. I seriously thought I had fixed this lag issue... by erasing my entire hard drive and reinstalling the OS from scratch with no backup recovery to ensure whatever issue is causing these lags before didn't get transferred over to this fresh OS install. But, the very moment I clicked that share button, everything went FUBAR again and Teams has been running awful since. It's like it has some weird memory leak that tends to compound in some preference file full of errors. I've deleted preference files before and that tended to help some but not a fix.
Hopefully this gives you enough of my experience and attempted resolve to work with?
I am also having the exact same issues on my Mac.
Screen flickering, complete system meltdown and eventually I have to force-quit teams to get things back to normal.
I have reverted to only attending teams meetings in the browser, as this seems to be more stable currently.
- Sam CosbyHello everyone - we have a fix for the flickering issue on Mac. I'll update more once it can be rolled out to users.
I have the exact same problem. If I have two meetings in a row, the Teams starts freezing my late model MacBook pro: video flickers, teams becomes unresponsive and the heat fan runs very high. I have to restart my computer pretty much every time after using teams for a session lest my computer comes unresponsive. I do not have any problems with any other software for work except when Teams is involved.
lukasparker Somewhere else, I read that a workaround solution for M1 Macs is to download edge and run Teams in that as a PWA and that it seems fast/stable. I'll be trying that
Sidenote. I have an 8 year old iMac. I am running Teams in Edge web browser and it's working perfectly. Video is not as good but its good enough and doesn't freeze or shutdown my Mac!
Sam Cosby - Hi Sam - Has this issue been addressed in some way yet? This issue drives me nuts (like everyone else posting here). The video quality stutters (audio + video lag/jumpiness). I am on a 16" Macbook Pro, and have a gig fios ethernet connection, There should be no lag.
Shifting to a web/browser version of teams is not ideal as it kills a lot of features - need a better behaving Teams client for mac.
Please advise on anything to improve this, or path to improved version of teams client timing.
Thanks!
JCI just want to put in that teams is also killing my mac. I have been using a mac and I have two computers connected to one screen, so to share the screen I remote in to one of the computers. When running teams and someone starts sharing their screen performance grinds to a halt. The system becomes unusable until the meeting ends.
- you guys planning to fix this? It seems it getting worse every time you push the new version.
I suspect Teams are throttling my internal GPU while in video call to the point that picture starts flickering - no throttling while in any other app.- mimchal735, No, they don't, they want us to throw away Macbooks and buy their windows products.
We are cursed with the Office365 in our organisation, they became monsters to our Macbook pros, esp the Teams application, such a pain to everyone, when someone in the meeting shares the screen, the display gets flickering and then machines go to freeze state, like a mosquito sucking blood, this is sucking so much power, we wonder this is not the situation with 5 times less priced windows machine with bare minimum Intel I5 processors and 8 GB ram, Microsoft should be embarrassed about this, and it seems this is either being done deliberately or not paying attention to the applications for Apple products. It is such a pity, My machine is a 2019 16Inch Macbook pro with a 4GB graphics card, and even that couldn’t hold this mammoth well, why teams have become such a pain, why are you people so numb on this? I really want to bash the heck out, and we are returning our MacBooks in exchange for windows with a shameful scenario like this; you should feel embarrassed about this.
Sometimes the CPU usage percentage goes beyond 100% too - Process "Microsoft Teams Help(Render)", when you click on the 'Teams' icon for the channels.
Microsoft seems to be unaffected of this they does not even care about apple products. i have been writing this post on twitter to, if you setup a meeting, I will show the same scenario live, I got another MacBook replaced, Microsoft successfully killed a machine with their Teams application.SunilNagavelli agree. Works well on a three year old entry spec MS Surface but not in a comparable Mac. Ok on my brand new M1 MacBook. What’s worse is Teams has crap spec. The screen cuts the participants images in half, no private chat and no second screen. So when someone shares a screen the grid of participants vanishes. Zoom is way better.
At an enterprise level if you have a large meeting the company’s MS enterprise servers can’t handle it and participants are often asked to turn off there screens - what a joke. I have a quarterly meeting with one large enterprise where only the chair has their screen on.
Time start telling IT departments to stick it and use Zoom. It is simply a way better product.
- i am forced to move from mac to your fav windows just because of Team does't work well in mac.
is there anytime when team will work as smooth as it works on windows or you never want that 🙂This is an update on my previous post:
I had a chance to have my old Macbook pro from 2015 replaced by a Macbook air M1 (2020) last month and it has nothing to compare with the nightmare I was living before.
Teams1.5.00.9159 works like a charm on this new machine, no freeze anymore, no intensive CPU usage, I can work on batteries while sharing screen and video several hours without having to plug it.
It's really day and night ! I know it's a shame to have to replace the hardware and that's not an answer to this issue, but I just wanted to give an update.
- Mica
- That's good to know, Mica Mine is a 2019 so not lucky with that.
Also tried to run through Microsoft browser (Edge) and didn't work either. Let's wait until Microsoft realizes is an issue worth fixing!
- I feel sorry for you devendray, and I am on the same boat with you, It is just that Microsoft doesn't give a **bleep** about MacOS, this is really strange, I wonder if the Microsoft Development team and the management are literally smiling at this thread that they are quite successful in killing MacBooks with their slow poison - Microsoft Teams.
- Sam
Thank you for attempting to help with this issue. I just started a new job in which MS Teams is the required remote meeting software. Teams is also killing my productivity.
It is really disappointing to see MS release a product knowing it has serious deficiencies. These deficiencies have real and negative impacts on peoples' professional lives.
I would encourage MS to move away from relying on its customers as a means to solve known issues and perform more product testing prior to releasing. Customers should not bear the costs of software deficiencies.
Mike - can you please confirm if teams works better on m1 Mac chip than intel. have Mac air 2020 intel and teams keeps crashing
- JohnSteckroth @samcosby
Issue has not been resolved completely. I am on an Intel Mac - with Teams open, the CPU fan keeps spinning, system starts exhibiting latency (even when I am not on a Teams call & not screen sharing). System performance improves the moment I close Teams. Is Microsoft still working on improving Teams performance for Intel Mac users?- Sam CosbyYes, there are many performance improvements in the pipeline for Intel Mac users as well that will also help, particularly in the meetings space.
- thanks for the heads up @samcosby. We hope that Microsoft prioritize this, as many Mac users (like me) are still relying on Teams for work. That's really hurting us all!
