My 15 year old Sony laptop can do better.
Even if Microsoft on Mac is an unmitigated dumpster fire, this is ridiculous.
I avoid using it whenever possible. If people email me, it’d better not be urgent.
(In fact I DO have a spare 13 year old laptop hanging around that still gets used for web browsing, mail and stuff. It is not slow.)
It's fascinating to me how people are still attached to the hardware upgrade cycle as an idea that matters, and yet for a huge chunk of people and scenarios, basically an SSD, 8gb of RAM and an Intel i5 from a decade ago could have been the end of computing history with no real loss to productivity.
I honestly look at people who use Apple or Windows with a bit of pity, because those ecosystems would just give me more stuff to worry about.
The M1 air was only released in November 2020. With a bit of slop in the numbers, its very possible the parent poster bought an intel mac just before the M1 launched.
Still doesn't take a minute to launch Outlook, but I understand your pain.
I keep hoping it will die, because it would be replaced with an M-series MBP and they are way, way, WAY faster than even the best Intel MBP.
It is Microsoft. I could rant all day about the dumpster fire that is the "NEW Microsoft Teams (Work or School)"
It's like the perfect shining example of how MS doesn't give a flaming fuck about their end users.
And while my particular problems might be partially because I am on MacOS, I observe Windows-using colleagues have just as many problems joining meetings (either total refusal, no audio, or sharing issues). So I think using Teams as a measure of any computer is probably not warranted.