Microsoft will launch a version of Teams adapted to Apple’s ARM processors over the next few months. Teams, initially designed for Macs running on Intel chips, should be more efficient and less resource-intensive than the current version, promises Microsoft.
Mac users running Intel will not be left out either. The new application will use Apple’s universal binary format to run natively on both Intel chips and Apple chips.
Teams competitors Zoom and Cisco Webex already support Apple’s chips.
The professionals are increasingly equipped with Macs. In the United States, for example, nearly a quarter of laptops in business were Macs in 2021 – compared to 17% in 2019 – figures the research firm IDC.
Apple users are also said to be more performance sensitive, adds Tom Arbuthnot, founder of training company Teams Empowering.Cloud. Many professionals would indeed use their Macs for processing-intensive tasks (like editing images or videos) and don’t want a collaboration tool to hog their system resources.
« [Les Macs] are not given, so [les utilisateurs] want very good performance in return,” he explains. “There is definitely feedback from the Mac community that the performance [de Teams] could be much better”.
For Bob O’Donnell, an analyst at Technalysis Research, Microsoft had to update Teams. The apps of videoconference were already consuming a lot of system resources with access to the camera and microphone. The trend has grown with features like noise cancellation and virtual backgrounds which load the CPU even more. In the absence of a real native application, machines that embed Apple chips had to resort to emulation to operate Teams, which further overloads the operation of the collaborative tool.
“The beauty of the ARM architecture used by Apple, is that it tends to be much more energy efficient,” recalls Bob O’Donnell. “But you only really get the benefits if you [programmez] native applications for it”.
Apple users have been asking for an Apple chip-friendly Teams for some time now. The request for such an application on Microsoft’s customer feedback forum received 3,216 votes, with users complaining about the high CPU usage and slowness of the current version.
Apple began replacing Intel processors in its machines with chips of its own design two years ago, with the intention of eventually running all Macs on its own hardware. Since then, Macs with Intel chips have been reduced to Mac Pros and specific Mac mini models.
This summer, Apple presented its first laptops equipped with the second generation of its house processors, the M2.