Microsoft has announced that its communications service, Teams, now runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs. This means that if you have a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac or Mac Studio powered by the Apple M1 or M2 family of processors, the app will now run at full native speed on those devices. Previously, the app was designed for Intel processors, so to run on Apple Silicon, it had to go through the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer, which adds some performance overhead.
Even when running natively, many would argue that Teams isn’t the fastest app, so having a version running at full native performance is a very welcome improvement. Microsoft says you should expect “significant performance boosts ensuring efficient use of device resources” as well as a more streamlined experience overall. The company specifically mentions scenarios where you might be using multiple high-resolution monitors during a call as one of the areas where you’ll see improvements.
According to Microsoft, the native Apple Silicon version of Teams is rolling out gradually to everyone, and you should expect to get it in the coming months. That’s a broad time frame, but hopefully most users will get it sooner rather than later and be able to enjoy faster performance.
Apple first introduced Apple Silicon Macs in late 2020, and these processors are based on the Arm architecture – the same type of processor that powers today’s smartphones. They’re very different from Intel processors, so a compatibility layer is needed – Arm-based Windows devices (with Qualcomm processors) face similar issues, but probably don’t get as much support as Apple Silicon. Over the past few years, we’ve seen many apps add their own support for Apple Silicon, including some of Microsoft’s own services. For example, the OneDrive sync client for Mac added support for Apple Silicon last year.
Source: Microsoft
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