Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

This is great especially because there is still no M1 version of teams and running the Intel version of teams on M1 makes the whole computer slow to a crawl.

But, at this point, I have to wonder if teams is just abandonware. Stuff like this thread and the lack of M1 support 2.5 years after the M1 transition was announced and over a year after you could walk into an apple store and buy an M1 computer? I don't understand what could prevent them from releasing an M1 version besides a complete lack of will to do so.

View on HN

Almost all Microsoft software feels like abandonware, which is wild when you consider how heavily they're promoting and profiting from it and how many and how heavily people use it.

I use excel/word daily and they work great on my M1 mac and feel modern.

Do you mean a mac version?

Honestly just having microsoft software adhere to apple human interface guidelines and the menu system improves it infinity percent (∞%)

Using office360 is a confusing jumbled mess.

I can't help but think it's on purpose.

I remember talking to an ex-microsoft guy decades ago about some incompatibility with some third party thing. I said sometimes new engineers didn't know how their software would be used or interact with other stuff. He told me not to be naive. Microsoft had meetings trying to figure out "how can we own this?"

My Win10 laptop has started shutting off the WLAN device at the worst times, and it seems to happen when a Bluetooth mouse is connected and a battery charger is plugged in at the same time.

The troubleshooter and report forms both crash on opening.

I guess that's one way to hit a "zero negative feedback" KPI!

The symptoms (aside from the feedback reporter issue) likely point at a hardware issue with the underlying machine, and probably not a software bug.

I've had WLAN shutoffs related to drivers, would you consider that hardware or software? Are you thinking power droops or what's the hardware history of WLAN shutoffs look like?

I'm suspecting a power issue and that the internal WLAN and Bluetooth device are likely on the same USB root hub. Have you checked the manufacturer for newer USB drivers?

I agree, I know it isn’t new with Microsoft, but they sure do consistently release slow buggy software. It would seem that a company as large of Microsoft could get ahead of the issue, but perhaps it their size and beurocracy actually make it harder to quality control.

I think a lot of their products are only held together by the hopes and dreams of their sales department.

I've had nothing but negative experiences with Microsoft and their products on macOS. Unsurprisingly, dealing with their "support engineers" is maybe even more frustrating than using a macOS device that is infected with their software.

Speaking as an experienced person when dealing with M365 products in our fleet, I absolutely, 100%, cannot, in good conscience recommend for any company that supports macOS devices to purchase or use any Microsoft products. There is simply no amount of money you can pay (I'm fairly certain we have one of the highest license tiers) in order to get any assurance that you will get any meaningful functionality or support from them.

Yeah I was in the same position. Support is useful when the issue is documented in the kbase. Which 95% of our issues aren't because it's they were I would have found the answer myself already.

The support people are outsourced and seem to be penalized for escalating so they really know no more than we do. Getting them to escalate something is really a fight. They tend to stall us requesting the same extensive logs over and over.

Well It isn't new with any similar company either, Apple consistently releases slow buggy software for years too, just remember XCode, ha-ha

Isn't it precisely when they can do that that you know it's a good business?

Good for whom?

I remember that microsoft had essentially sunsetted Microsoft Teams while they worked on a complete rewrite to be built into Windows. They were partially through it...

And then Covid happened.

Then, they had to go back and work on the old app, fixing as many issues as fast as they could because now a lot of people suddenly depended on the app.

To their credit, they did eventually fix the most pressing issues (more than two video streams showing at once, push-to-talk mode, etc...), but I do think they'll need to go back to a rewrite that can be used cross platform.

If you're running an Apple Silicon Mac you can get an early build of Teams osx-arm64 from the exploration build link listed here.[0]

I've been running a daily build for a few weeks and it's noticeably better than the Intel build on an M1 Pro. It launches in half the time and feels far more responsive (probably due to not needing to use the Rosetta JIT for Electron). That said it's still a daily "exploration" build so YMMV.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-m...

How do you prevent it from automatically updating to the Intel version? I keep downloading the preview builds and they keep getting updated.

Maybe try to delete the launch agent (`com.microsoft.update.agent.plist` in `/Library/LaunchAgents`)

and launch daemon (`com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist` in `/Library/LaunchDaemons`)

Can confirm it is snappier on a M1 Macbook Pro and using *less* RAM, maybe about 10% less.

I love you.

It's not abandoned, they are working on it a lot. Every month sees major updates. The problem is that they are only working on adding glossy new features and ignoring performance. So it's becoming ever glossier and ever slower.

When it first came out it was pretty snappy. Now I can't switch to another chat tab without a loading spinner, statuses are not updating anymore unless I click on them etc..

Looks at Teams on Linux... yeah... abandonware

Abandon suggests it might have been half-way decent to start with.

This was a pile of steaming shit from the get-go.

Given how hard MS has been pushing RTO, and how unlikely they are to be Mac users, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just don’t feel the pain like everyone else and therefore don’t care.

RTO = Return to Office ?

Yes

Teams on Windows is just as bad.

There absolutely are native M1 builds of Teams. They just aren't widely known about.

See https://github.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-msinternal/blob/...

See the "osx-x64 + osx-arm64" builds.

"They just aren't widely known about"

That's seriously the understatement of the past 8 months. which is about as long as I've been trying to find this (unsuccessfully).

Anyway, thank you!

I wish it was abandonware as it was quite performant at first. Now it seems every feature they add adds a memory print of several gb main memory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com