The collaboration suite has actually arrived in the Apple SoC world since the end of July. This has now been officially confirmed and an update has been added.
The last processes that were still running in the Rosetta 2 emulation mode within teams have been changed: the Mac version of the client for Microsoft’s collaboration suite has now fully arrived in the Apple Silicon world.
That even worked prematurely: the software giant had actually only announced the switch away from the Intel version for September.
Long wait finally over
Microsoft was actually quite early on when it came to supporting Apple’s ARM chips: Both the Office 365 package and the Edge browser were launched in the year the first M1 Macs were launched. The group only took a lot of time with teams. The specific reason for this was never mentioned. Initially it was conceivable that it was due to the use of the (not undisputed) Electron framework for the app – although Electron was also made Apple Silicon-capable in a timely manner.
Microsoft’s step into the ARM world under macOS took place in two stages. Initially, a first native team version was distributed at the end of July. However, this still came with a non-native core audio driver. Well, at the beginning of August, another update followed – as well as Microsoft’s official confirmation that Teams was now “optimized for Apple Silicon”. According to Microsoft employee Anupam Pattnaik, it has been heard that users with Apple Silicon Macs want a team that is optimized for their devices. Therefore, a universal binary version is now being rolled out that supports Intel as well as M1 and M2. “Everything now runs natively across the Mac lineup.”
“Efficient use of device resources”
Pattnaik acknowledged that the update delivers “a significant boost in performance.” “We thus ensure the efficient use of device resources.” In fact, Teams was previously notorious for Mac utilization on Apple Silicon machines, which are otherwise snappy and performant. The app also started comparatively slowly.
What is disturbing, however, is that Microsoft has not yet declared the “General Availability” (GA) of the Apple Silicon version of Teams – it will take several weeks, so the update will be carried out gradually. It can help to either participate in the Teams Preview program (which then also gives you other previews) or simply download and install the client again.
