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Teams is killing my Mac every day

• mattmcknight 4y ago
  I just run it in the browser- then it's subject to normal out of control browser tab limitations.
• Aaronstotle 4y ago
  I had an issue with Teams where it would open for a short period of time then exit immediately, this was on an 2019 15" MBP. Teams is an impressively awful product
  • corrral 4y ago
    It's bizarre to me that smallish teams in the 90s were able to make native "apps"—sometimes even multi-platform—for markets so tiny that they'd be considered beneath notice now, but huge companies today only seem to be able to produce fragile low-quality resource-eating webtech shitware, with much larger teams. WTF happened?
    • cevn 4y ago
      Management wants you to make a cross platform app, but with the minimum "cost". Who is going to spend all that time making 5 good apps when you can make 1 shitty one instead? I guess what actually happened is cross platform tech advanced, but this ease of development has actually worsened the user experience.
    • dkonofalski 4y ago
      $$$$ Companies realized that they could save money by using mediocre coders to create MVP products using things like Chromium and then, instead of refining those products, they scale them up massively (which the MVPs were never intended for).
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      As the saying goes, two programmers can always create in two months what one programmer can create in one week.
    • michelb 4y ago
      But that’s just it. Markets are huge now. You have to be fast to market to grab a big chunk and dominate. No company who has Teams will use Zoom, and equally shitty product that was also rushed. If you have O365, you probably won’t use slack, Microsoft wins.
      • arccy 4y ago
        was at a big corp, you could be contacted over teams, skype, slack, or email, with meetings in teams or zoom.
    • ta8903 4y ago
      This might not be entirely related but something I've noticed is that whenever you see the promotional material for a modern UI toolkit you will find that it's marketed for ease of use for developers rather than making easy to use applications for users.
      • ryandrake 4y ago
        This is a developer culture problem as much as it is a technology problem. Developers (and their bosses) care less and less every year about runtime performance, stability, quality and so on. Management just figures it's easier to find a truck full of JavaScript developers than it is to find two good C++ developers, so everyone just agrees to choose technologies that are popular and trade off end user's needs for developer speed and comfort. The industry has sacrificed so much at the altar of "developer convenience".
• kissgyorgy 4y ago
  Microsoft Teams is the biggest piece of garbage of a chat software you can ever imagine. Never seen worse, actually considering quitting from the company I'm currently working for because of the daily struggle Teams is causing us. Insanely frustrating.
• smoldesu 4y ago
  They're using an i9 16" Macbook Pro. I don't mean to split hairs here, but if there's a single modern Mac advocate who will say that it's not a hardware issue then I suggest idling one of those machines with Safari open. You'll have no problem rocketing past 45c with barely anything open!
  • turtlebits 4y ago
    I only had issues on the Intel 16" Macbook pro when attached to an external monitor (I forget which side). Otherwise, Teams is that bad.
  • orang2tang 4y ago
    I had one for work and it would get so hot that it would freeze just browsing with a few browsing tabs and Teams open. Not every single time but enough to be annoying. Fastest spec laptop I have ever owned and also the slowest.
  • amluto 4y ago
    I used to use various video chat programs on an original Athlon 64. It worked just fine. There is really no excuse for video meetings to work so poorly on a modern-ish laptop.
    • rootsudo 4y ago
      Aim, Yahoo, MSN, Skype, what else was running back in the day?
      • amluto 4y ago
        IIRC Google Talk or Chat or whatever it was called (the XMPP product that worked quite well) had some video support, and there was even a degree of their party client support.
        • fswd 4y ago
          I remember... I had half dozen chat clients open, 100+ open tabs in Mozilla Phoenix browser, editors with large projects open for weeks,... compiling, building kernels, running SQL servers, running multiple window VMs, ... all with 100-200 day uptimes. This was back in 2004-2006. AMD Athlon 64, RHEL 3. 512mb of ram... dual 19" LCD displays.
• jleyank 4y ago
  Sept 2021. What is current day performance on intel or apple chipsets?
  • rayiner 4y ago
    Garbage. Teams may be the worst Microsoft product in a decade.
    • vitaflo 4y ago
      Teams is the worst software I’ve used since Lotus Notes.
    • justusthane 4y ago
      Skype For Business was worse.
    • arprocter 4y ago
      They recently changed something in Teams (I first noticed at the beginning of June) - now if you don't move your mouse for 5 mins it automatically marks you 'idle' and...stops receiving messages. Then when you move the mouse all the messages people sent while you were idle arrive at once. If you don't run it on your main machine this becomes pretty annoying pretty fast, and there doesn't seem to be an option anywhere to change 'mark me idle after' time
      • juice_bus 4y ago
        I find the auto idle exceedingly frustrating - sometimes it doesn't kick in, sometimes it kicks in very quickly. Sometimes i have to restart the whole application to get it to flip back to Available.
        • spaetzleesser 4y ago
          I don’t even look at the indicators anymore. A lot of people get stuck on yellow or red and never change to green.
      • 4y ago
• mschuster91 4y ago
  For me (2019 16-inch MBP, i9, 64 GB RAM) Teams in normal operations is no problem... but for some reason, when involved in large video calls, it will hog the dGPU during the call (probably for transcoding the streams) but not release it, which makes the battery go empty faster than a Porsche's tank on a German highway... If you ever notice blaring fans after a video call, open Activity Monitor and check if the GPU indicator in the Energy tab says High Performance or Integrated, and if the former, sort by "GPU" column to see which app is hogging it.
  • garren 4y ago
    I ran into something similar. 2019 15” MBP, i9, 16gb Video calls while using an external monitor (40” Dell), particularly when screen sharing, dramatically slow the machine down. Enough to render it unusable during the call and for a little while afterwards. Not an issue I recall hitting in Zoom or WebEx. I disconnect my external monitor while taking Teams calls now.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      The reason may be having a second screen attached. As soon as you have, the Macbook will always enable the dGPU - probably because Apple saved a couple dozen bucks for a displayport matrix chip so that the TB controllers' DP inputs could also be served by the iGPU.
• euroclydon 4y ago
  I have my MacBook configured to never sleep and I leave Teams open on it. Even though the program is right there staring at me, if I work on another computer for a couple hours, after some time, Teams doesn't show me any incoming chats until I click on it, and then they flood in, showing me everything that I've missed.
  • animesh 4y ago
    This is my biggest issue with it. I log in at 10AM and keep working until 1230 or so. Then I click on Teams tray icon. I get all the messages flooding in. My team who needs me think I am an asshole who has been online for at least 2 hours and not responded to them. I have to remember to click on the tray icon the moment it appears in the tray to fix this.
  • makz 4y ago
    Happens on windows as well
• siva7 4y ago
  Anyone else doesn’t receive anymore Teams Messages on their Macbook when you close the lid and then reopen? I have to restart teams, and i own 3 Macbooks with different Versions of MacOS and CPU Architecture, all show the same problem since a few weeks.
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    Some times I only get messages on the (Windows) desktop client when I open the app on my phone... So, well, it's normal.
• wishinghand 4y ago
  I'm on a Windows laptop and use Teams for work. It's not as bad as the OP but still impressively substandard. Often times I won't be able to join a call and it'll freeze the entire program. I'll use ctrl+alt+delete to clear it from Task Manager and restart it and it still can't connect. A full reboot is needed.
• vannevar 4y ago
  Your Mac, and my soul.
• somecommit 4y ago
  Teams is so annoying even on windows. Why when someone react on a chat message, opening the chat channel is not enough to dismiss the notification counter? No! I need to click on "Activity" tab. Here I see a list of my activities. The reaction is still here! Someone put an emoji on my text. I exult. Teams can now dismiss the notification counter...
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    The activity notification issue is annoying. Also: how can you provide a wiki module that’s not searchable? Teams feels to me like it’s thrown together by a bunch of interns that are learning Agile. Keep changing things without any strategy.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • fuzzy2 4y ago
    It’s actually even more dumb: Teams does dismiss notification as they come into view. As they come into view. Notification is about a message you already see? Scroll away a little, scroll back again, bingo, notification dismissed. Works at least 90% of the time.
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      My Teams installation for work isn't dismissing even messages nowadays (it updated recently). It never dismissed notifications just by viewing them. In fact, it doesn't even reliably receive messages. At times there are days of delay from the message being sent to me receiving it. Anyway, no two people seem to have similar experiences with the application...
      • gpderetta 4y ago
        Sometimes it randomly misses entire bits of chat history. Once a colleague replied to an old chat message. I clicked on it and nothing happened. I scrolled up and I found out that I had an hole of 3 days on my history.
• cyberpunk 4y ago
  I love the way I have to restart it every few hours because it becomes impossible to alt*tab to it otherwise. I mean, alt tab and select teams and whatever you have open loses focus, but it doesn’t actually switch to teams. Superb. 0/10 software.
• CryptoBanker 4y ago
  Teams will literally crash my 16 inch i9 Macbook Pro (2021). Failing that, it will drain the battery in an hour or two (even when nothing is happening on teams). God forbid I try to copy or paste some text on teams... Teams is an absolutely garbage app and platform....on a good day
  • _fat_santa 4y ago
    My company uses Teams (thank god for meetings only, we use Slack for chat) but it's become a running joke of sorts that I have to "drop for memory". At least once a week I'll be in the middle of the meeting and have to say: "sorry I have to drop and join again, Teams is eating my memory". For context I have a 16" MBP, i7, 16GB RAM.
  • edgefield 4y ago
    Teams chat seems to work fine on my 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 processor. We typically use zoom for video calls. MS Outlook on the other hand frequently crashes. Maybe there’s a memory leak issue?
    • tapanjk 4y ago
      > MS Outlook on the other hand frequently crashes. Maybe there’s a memory leak issue? Off-topic but I need to get this off my chest: Outlook on the web is a much better experience than the native app on the Mac.
      • vladvasiliu 4y ago
        I don't know if the native app on the Mac is the same as the Windows one, but the latter is absolute crap. It's sooo laggy. Sure, I don't have a 64 core thread ripper or other ridiculous CPU, but even on my 11th gen i7 work laptop, the webapp runs circles around the native app. Even on Firefox on Linux. However, they must have caught wind of this, because there have been some "improvements" recently, where they reduced the vertical screen space with an empty menu line, and it also feels a bit less snappy than before.
      • 4y ago
• hurril 4y ago
  It's an incredible piece of crap on an M1 Max too. It's by far the heaviest piece of software I run on it, and that's counting games and heavy Scala and F# development. A flippin video chat :) Slack, which is also an incredible pos, feels snappy and lightweight in comparison.
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    > A flippin video chat The video chat is less terrible than it’s worst parts. Managing documents through it is just gross.
    • hurril 4y ago
      Didn't even know that was possible. But yes: huddling and sharing screens in slack actually deserves some credit because that always works well. (Jesus C. - I just gave software credit for working.) In my mind Slack does not add one iota to mIRC 4.5 (?) which fit a single 1.44M diskette and came as a single executable. That shit started before the MouseUp event was even fired on pre-pentium hardware. What in the name of something holy happened?
    • thecrumb 4y ago
      I believe it's using Sharepoint behind the scenes, so yeah... gross.
    • prepend 4y ago
      Whoever thought that I’d want to edit a word doc in a frame in teams is insane. I’m not sure the use case where anyone wants to do that rather than launch Word or launch a browser. It’s so dumb as it has a limited subset of functionality and takes over my screen from a meeting and only opens one document at a time. That and if I try to link to a document it links to opening the document in teams. It’s so bizarre. I can’t imagine the Teams team dogfooding Teams. Or perhaps I can and it’s some schizophrenic bizarre group who thinks it’s all intuitive. It kind of reminds me of how crazy the Steam client is with it’s crappy browser stuff. But at least they have links working properly.
  • michelb 4y ago
• sliken 4y ago
  Does teams use more CPU/Ram resources than it should ... definitely. Does the Apple MBP i9 laptops have terrible performance under load ... definitely. Any number of things (compiling, crashplan backups, video conf teams/zoom/bluejean, etc) causes the CPU load to spike, the laptop to get too hot, fans spin up loudly, and huge thermal throttling that continues until the system is idle for awhile. Seems like about half the blame is Apple's.
  • droopyEyelids 4y ago
    Should a video chat client, running on a computer with hardware video encoders, make the computer work as hard as compelling software, or scanning compressing and transmitting the entire hard drive?
  • cyberge99 4y ago
    No. I’m on a state of the art M1 Max and it takes 20-30 seconds to start Teams. About 15-30 seconds to join a meeting. On my intel mbp it was even worse. Any other app loads near instantly (aside from Affinity Photo, which I expect). If there’s a fault in Teams for Mac it’s either due to incompetent design/implementation or maliciousness.
  • dkonofalski 4y ago
    I think this is all on Microsoft's shoulders. I have an M1 Max machine, an i9 machine and a PC with an i7 and Teams runs equally horribly on all platforms. I would say that I have "less" issues on the M1 Max but I don't think it has anything to do with the machine itself other than it's more powerful than the others so can handle it.
• Kaze404 4y ago
  I think I've mentioned this 5 times before on this website, but on Linux Teams will keep recording your microphone after you leave a meeting (which is easily verifiable through pavucontrol). In the year and a half that I worked at a company using Teams, this was always the case. The only way to make it stop is to restart the process.
  • desindol 4y ago
    Deactivate the ultrasonic sensing for meeting equipment and you are good…
• flir 4y ago
  The answer: Two macs, and Universal Control. (You think I'm joking... you should see my desk)
• jasoneckert 4y ago
  If you don't want to use the Microsoft Teams app (which uses a lot of resources), you can: 1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on your Mac 2. Log into https://teams.microsoft.com https://teams.microsoft.com 3. Click ... > Apps > Install this site as an app This will create an Edge app for Teams that uses almost no resources but has feature parity with the regular Microsoft Teams app. We tell all of our students to do this, and it has solved all Microsoft Teams performance issues on student Macs (both Intel and Apple Silicon).
  • twoquestions 4y ago
    Can you still share your screen with this version?
    • jasoneckert 4y ago
      Yes
    • twoquestions 4y ago
      Took me a minute to set up a test meeting, but it looks like you can!
    • approxim8ion 4y ago
      Screen sharing works. Screen control (as in, controlling a screen someone else has shared) does not.
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    And you can have multiple windows.
  • gnicholas 4y ago
    What features does this allow that aren't available if you just use the website via FF/Brave?
    • Foivos 4y ago
      When I tried to do the same, it complained about lack of features on browsers other than edge, without specifying anything.
• adzm 4y ago
  I know teams was originally written on classic AngularJS, and was supposedly undertaking a significant rewrite in order to resolve performance and maintainability problems. Anyone aware if this was ever completed?
  • spystath 4y ago
    It may happen eventually but they have no incentive to make it so. They've captured a significant part of the corporate market by bundling with O365 for Enterprise. Teams has fulfilled it's purpose just as Office did. At least Office is decent software.
    • tester756 4y ago
      Office is nice, as long as they dont hide Desktop downloaders on their website and try to force you to use their Web version which is like 1/3 of real desktop office.
• iasay 4y ago
  Our modern software stack, processes and attitude leaves us with this sort of product. It's broken at every level.
• tonymet 4y ago
  Teams is the worst Microsoft app i’ve used in terms of performance and reliability. critical UI elements like the mute button will suddenly disappear permanently. features like chat will disappear and reappear on reboot . i’ve been suddenly logged out in the middle of calls and prompted to enter microsoft login when it’s not needed . and ditto to the comments on memory and cpu consumption Microsoft needs to fix teams asap
  • prepend 4y ago
    As much as I hated Skype for Business it was at least reliably terrible. Teams has a habit of silently logging me out even though I’m using it in a call. Stuff will just stop working because it decided it needed to reauth me without prompting. So I’ll be in a meeting and screen share will stop working or chat will stop working until I shut down and log in. Of course the top right profile still shows me logged in, but it lies. It was real fun trying to figure out what was happening there. I found out because multiple people had IM’d me but Teams wasn’t showing me the messages. It was saying delivered to the sender. When I restarted I had a stream of new, unread messages. The unreliability is the most frustrating part. How can the app lie about delivering messages?
    • tonymet 4y ago
      Messaging reliability is critical. The expectations for consistency ( sender & recipient see the same view), reliability , low-latency , availability are so much higher than with a typical web or desktop app. There are some apps that get the performance & UX quality standards and some that don't.
  • tonymet 4y ago
    sadly i tried to use it today and again got caught in a recursive SSO of death. The team needs to be mindful of the criticality of making a call and get all of the unnecessary blockers out of the critical path
• polskibus 4y ago
  I think MS should rewrite teams into .net or c++ just like the rest of office is written. Nobody would use Outlook if it was performing like Teams is today.
  • Jaruzel 4y ago
    I invite you to read up on the truly awful Teams style OneOutlook client that MS are about to roll out: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125532/microsoft-new-one-outlook-beta-feature-details-loop-to-do-calendar https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125532/microsoft-new-on...
    • dickersnoodle 4y ago
      This is what happens when management gets sweet-talked into thinking you can make everything a web app.
• zokier 4y ago
  Teams is hot garbage. But posting Teams bashing threads on HN feels just preaching to the choir and beating dead horse for some fake internet points. As per guidelines, I don't find the topic to gratify ones intellectual curiosity.
  • gpderetta 4y ago
    It is cathartic.
  • prepend 4y ago
    I feel like Teams is gaslighting me. And my org’s IT signs its praises and is never able to recreate any of my issues. These threads help me understand that it’s not just me. So it definitely helps gratify my intellectual curiosity as to whether I’ve broken with reality.
• ActorNightly 4y ago
  Teams definitely sucks, but this statement made me chuckle >Teams is murdering my MacBook Pro 16" i9 with 16GB RAM every day. This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time Its quite surprising how supposedly tech people are actually out of touch with tech.
  • lghh 4y ago
    I don't understand. What's specifically out of touch about this?
    • ActorNightly 4y ago
      First, the specs on the Intel MBP weren't even top of the line. You could get laptops with slighyl higher spec CPUs, and much better discrete graphics like the 2080 that blew the AMD graphics in MBPs out of the water. Secondly, and most importantly, having a powerful chip, in a small chassis without adequate cooling = hard thermal throttling. The M1 chips are an upgrade on top of this with much less power draw for same performance, however both M1 Air and Pro still throttle, and M2 will throttle most likely more. If you want top of the line performance in a laptop, you have to buy one of those bulky ones with very loud fans, and expect that running at full performance on battery will drain the battery quickly There is no way around this. And to call those machines "laptops" is really a misnomer even, considering that its almost painful having them on your lap due to the heat.
      • lghh 4y ago
        Not every single word has to be read 100% literally every time you read it. It is a very powerful laptop. In the top .5% of laptops purchased in the year it was purchased, most likely. It does not have to literally be the most powerful laptop a person can buy. I think everyone reading that sentence understood that but you.
        • ActorNightly 4y ago
          Do you understand what thermal throttling means? It means your powerful-on-paper computer becomes just as powerful as a much lower priced computer. And that is also assuming that the rest of the computer is good. Lets not forget the horrendous touchbar, the multitude of bugs in the OS, the lack of ports and hubs that have issues and in some cases end up frying the smc, shoddy external monitor compatibility and so on. Issues that my much cheaper laptop that is running linux does not have.
• AnonC 4y ago
  Microsoft needs to disband the Teams team and start afresh with a non-Electron base that’s better designed. MS Teams is awful on Windows too. It’s slow to respond and makes the system slower. Having 16GB RAM and not running anything else that’s heavy doesn’t make much of a difference either. MS Teams is like the camel in the story “The Arab and the Camel”. Teams won’t stop until it occupies the entire tent!
  • fuzzy2 4y ago
    The problem isn’t with Electron. Electron is really fast. It isn’t even with voice or video or whatever. Those are native DLLs/libraries with good codecs if you have the desktop app installed. No. The problem is that Teams was rushed to market a few years back to compete with Slack and whatnot. Using Angular.js (that’s right, not Angular 2+ which was already available). Years passed. Stuff keeps getting added. It’s still Angular.js.
    • bob1029 4y ago
      > Using Angular.js (that’s right, not Angular 2+ which was already available). Years passed. Stuff keeps getting added. It’s still Angular.js. Wait. Teams is using the original version of Angular JS to serve as the UI framework? This is substantial news to me. Certainly would explain everything. The amount of technological shame I am witnessing continues to grow without bound. Microsoft is worth how much money on the open market?
      • AtNightWeCode 4y ago
        They used AngularJS a long time ago but Teams today is an React app. The problem is clearly with JS/Electron. Slack have also performance issues.
        • ghosty141 4y ago
          Discord doesn't, it's Electron too. That's not the root of the problem. Discord is pretty fast, I haven't really noticed it "chugging" and lagging like MSTeams does.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  The worst part is that every time you launch Teams, it adds itself to your login items (on Mac, at least). It doesn't matter how many times you've removed it before, it just keeps happening. I heard you can turn this 'feature' off, but you have to log in with an MS account to do so. No thanks — I exclusively use Teams on the web.
• codebolt 4y ago
  I was an early adopter of Teams and generally feel like MS gets too much criticism for e.g. Windows. I really wanted to like Teams. But having used it daily for two years, the only thing I'm impressed with is how badly they managed to mess it up. Whatever software team worked on this should be ashamed. It caused my 3 year old high-end Windows laptop to hang completely after a few minutes of conversation, sometimes eating all my CPU with no activity whatsoever. Tried to do a clean boot, didn't help. Had to get a new laptop just because of Teams.
• Brajeshwar 4y ago
  Whenever someone invites me to a meeting with MS Teams, I request them if we can do an alternate. Even if not, I still keep the alternate link handy. When the meeting starts and things don't work, I just give them the alternate link and they usually go, "This just works." Most corporate users are not aware of alternates and just use the ones their company picks without questioning.
• riffic 4y ago
  Good old Microsoft quality as usual. I have no idea how VSC is actually a decent product though.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    Because the Monaco editor was a do or die for the TypeScript project so they threw everything in it to make it good and prove to MS higher ups to double down investing in TypeScript. Also, it's open source which helps.
• MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  Protip: using the web app version that runs in Chrome is a little better than the standalone app.
• bnycum 4y ago
  I have also had a bunch of issues with Teams on Mac. Honestly I just use an iPad for meetings on Teams these days, it is the only way to get it to work. However I can never get the government Teams meetings to work on my iPad at all, end up just dialing in for those. On the Mac they just crash. My work uses Skype for all conversations, I have noticed it getting just as bad for Mac. Randomly killing my webcam until restarting, absolutely stuttering.
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  Same problem with Zoom video sharing - I often have to completely restart after a video call (which I do all the time these days).
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  The one thing I hate about Teams and Outlook on Mac is that it takes a full minute to convert a smiley face :) to the emoji equivalent. Sometimes it even crashes the apps. I haven't had this experience with Teams on my similar MBP 2016, but do experience it on a Surfacebook 2. I could never understand why these electron apps just destroy certain machines though. I'm not doing anything intensive on them. It would be lovely to have light-weight clients similar to mIRC just to do the daily chatting.
• tannhaeuser 4y ago
  On the plus side, deciding for a Mac-friendly project as a freelancer means I don't have to use Teams.
• an-allen 4y ago
  Same for me. This only started happening in the last 4-6 weeks. Prior to that it was relatively stable.
• cbtacy 4y ago
  I'm going to argue that Teams has replaced Powerpoint as my most hated MS software product. The only way I now use Teams is from the browser. And even then, as others have said, I keep a prepared Zoom link ready in case everything goes to s*t.
• visionscaper 4y ago
  Only tangentially related; why is Teams removing space indentations in chats on MacOS? It’s so annoying when you type a piece of (pseudo) code, all leading spaces are removed! It drives me nuts, why would anyone implement this!
  • Pbhaskal 4y ago
    Correct. It happens in my windows 10 too. It messes all yaml content.
  • hbn 4y ago
    It's been doing that for a while, and I don't think it used to. I can't imagine it's intentional. Pasting formatted/styled text into Teams always ends up outputting some butchered version of what it originally was.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  >MacBook Pro 16" i9 with 16GB RAM every day. This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time Firstly that entire era of MacBooks is hot garbage, literally. The case can’t handle the heat the processor creates. Even for basic tasks they all sucked and were probably the poorest performing Macs in multiple decades. But here’s the real issue, end of the day there is no incentive for devs to build proper performant Mac apps anymore. The sheer cost and team required to ship one of these natively as well as on top of the iPhone and iPad apps which again require custom work each is absurd compared to just shipping a chrome wrapper that doesn’t seem to impact the success of an app at all, hard to name a popular Mac app these days that isn’t just a chromium wrapper, outside of video/audio/3D software.
  • parentheses 4y ago
    The solution use their product to run this software in the cloud.
  • 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
    >This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time cry me a river, post comes across kind of entitled. I used this MS bloatware app on a 2015 macbook and it runs ok, no worse than slack at least - but I'm 2 Os's behind.
  • windowsrookie 4y ago
    I hear this all the time, but my 15" 2018 i7 model has been great. The 16" i9 models in particular seem to have the most complaints. Not sure what went wrong with those models.
  • hu3 4y ago
    This is what I don't understand. MacBooks, which are frequently advertised as being "the greatest ever", run Teams so poorly while mediocre Windows and Linux laptops barely feel Teams running. I write this from a client-issued $1000 Windows laptop that is running a ton of crap plus Teams with no fan sound to be heard. While the Intel MacBook next to me is screaming from just a few browser tabs and slack.
• pawelduda 4y ago
  At one point I thought slack is bad, until I worked for a company that used teams. Never again!
• bob1029 4y ago
  Teams needs a native rewrite or simply be relegated to a dumbass web app (which it effectively already is today). The amount of bullshit my team puts up with around this product still shocks me. I sometimes wonder if this software is bad on purpose to condition us for something worse down the road.
• millzlane 4y ago
  And here I am 12:49 up 57 days, 22:14, 2 users, load averages: 4.08 4.80 5.17 With teams (1.5.00.17261) running on a 2017 imac 2.3 dual core i5 16gb all day. I wonder why his computer is running this one app like that. I can't be the anomaly. $ top -l 1 -n 0 Processes: 662 total, 3 running, 2 stuck, 657 sleeping, 3063 threads 2022/07/13 12:56:03 Load Avg: 5.04, 7.65, 6.85 CPU usage: 43.62% user, 35.80% sys, 20.57% idle SharedLibs: 332M resident, 59M data, 18M linkedit. MemRegions: 189673 total, 7200M resident, 53M private, 1022M shared. PhysMem: 16G used (3372M wired), 19M unused. VM: 22T vsize, 3135M framework vsize, 453825346(0) swapins, 462064845(0) swapouts. Networks: packets: 107141152/85G in, 49052373/11G out. Disks: 88964543/2627G read, 134036320/2890G written. $ vm_stat Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes) Pages free: 35882. Pages active: 1334360. Pages inactive: 1336020. Pages speculative: 1259. Pages throttled: 0. Pages wired down: 870879. Pages purgeable: 1650. "Translation faults": 9544416536. Pages copy-on-write: 254263151. Pages zero filled: 4849057170. Pages reactivated: 1257299202. Pages purged: 18555371. File-backed pages: 787054. Anonymous pages: 1884585. Pages stored in compressor: 8987653. Pages occupied by compressor: 615543. Decompressions: 341213320. Compressions: 400079701. Pageins: 148819424. Pageouts: 1660395. Swapins: 453931279. Swapouts: 462133043.
• yborg 4y ago
  No BigCorp is going to cancel O365 because Teams sucks. Teams accomplished its objective of squashing Slack in enterprise, Microsoft has no incentive to improve it.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I can only assume the bosses at Microsoft are out golfing all the time and not using Teams or rather iMessaging each other. Otherwise it makes no sense that they themselves would put up with the garbage that they have control of fixing. I would also be embarrassed of such low quality product, but I know that sentiment may not be shared universally.
• tester756 4y ago
  Discord is probably the only company that can make voice+chat+streaming software right. It's insane how bad Teams' chat is. I don't know who was crazy enough to paste fucking formating with text, so when you copy from IDE/docs/whatever then Teams applies font sizes / colors and makes mess, so you have to copy stuff to e.g notepad and then to Teams. Additionally leaving `` block sometime doesn't work <wtf> Cool software doesn't do crazy shit with Clipboard and Links __________ lack of Push2Talk option (not mute/unmute btn) is tragedy, did those people ever play some video games with teams/guilds? Ventrilo had this feature in probably 2003, Discord uses it too, but enterprise communicators struggle to figure this simple feature despite being so good, especially when everybody was WFH and had people in the house talking. ____________ On the positives side - calendar and its integrations are unparalleled and meetings are decent.
  • bobkazamakis 4y ago
    >Discord is probably the only company that can make voice+chat+streaming software right. it's absurd to a level where they could white-label their existing stuff and aim it at commercial applications.
    • bob1029 4y ago
      I've desperately wanted to spend money on a better solution like this, but gaming being the only major use case makes it a difficult sell to the rest of the team. That cute UI bullshit wears thin very quickly in a work setting. It's also really tricky to get other 3rd parties and vendors to join your discord meetings in 2022. All they would need to do is remove a bunch of gaming-related crap and sell it as Discord for Business to take our money from us. Maybe just a light sprinkle of outlook integration would be nice too. I'd sign annual agreements for this today if it was an option.
      • mark_and_sweep 4y ago
        Agreed. Don't understand why they don't do it. Would love to have my employer spend money on Discord, indirectly financing free voice chat for my evening gaming sessions...
• adamrezich 4y ago
  it's kind of wild that Teams is as bad as it is—doesn't it ship with Windows 11? it should be a first-class tool, but instead it's terrible. Discord, Slack, and countless other applications have figured out how to do markdownesque formatting, yet nine times out of ten I can't send a simple code block without resorting to using the "code snippet" button... but one out of ten times it works alright. baffling.
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  Lol last time I had a company issued laptop Teams would consume so many resources my browser wouldn't even be able to open up again until I rebooted. Worst application of all time...
• mirekrusin 4y ago
  Teams is by far the worst application I had to interact with in the last decade. Sometimes I have to go to incognito to open meeting link. Other times I have to open link from Chrome because opening from FF doesn't work. Sometimes I have to reinstall it. Sometimes audio decides not to work. It takes 1 minute to launch it. I mean, if you have a meeting, 10m notification in advance is about right as that's the time you need to start launching it and you should be just on time or just a little bit late. I have no idea what the team developing teams is doing. They should be all fired and rehired just to be fired again. Maybe they're using teams for standups/meetings or something?
• nittanymount 4y ago
  I was wondering if MS use Teams internally, the answer is yes. (asked here before and asked a friend moved to MS... haha, not sure how they could bear with it...) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31186894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31186894
• asdajksah2123 4y ago
  This might help someone. Do you have adblock of some sort? Especially something at the DNS level, like the PiHole operating on your computer or network? Because that will absolutely destroy Teams. Teams tries to send Telemetry to MS, and the code is poorly written, where it keeps stacking up all those messages it was supposed to send, and keeps trying to resend them. This adds up and brings it to a grinding halt. Try disabling the ad/dns blocking and see if it helps.
  • jen20 4y ago
    > Teams tries to send Telemetry to MS, > Try disabling the ad/dns blocking and see if it helps. Absolutely the fuck not. It wouldn't surprise me if this turned out to be an issue, but the idea that the solution is to allow Microsoft to exfiltrate whatever the hell they like on the whims of their product management is abhorrent - not a solution.
    • pawelduda 4y ago
      Maybe they can add an opt-out telemetry checkbox which will magically reset to default state after every update
    • asdajksah2123 4y ago
      This is not a solution. It's a tip on determining whether this is your problem. For many people who are required to use Teams, and have this issue, it might be a necessary solution until MS gets its act together. For many who have alternatives, they may choose to abandon Teams itself.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        >until MS gets its act together. So, in other words, permanently disabling ad blocking
    • tatersolid 4y ago
      > the idea that the solution is to allow Microsoft to exfiltrate whatever the hell they like on the whims of their product management is abhorrent - not a solution. What? You’re already sending all the content of your chats and meetings to Microsoft servers. Why do you worry about sending telemetry that might actually help some dev fix some bugs?
• rafaelturk 4y ago
  I've never installed Teams. Always used from chrome.
• bedast 4y ago
  At my previous job, I despised using Teams. I know, we're not supposed to be multitasking during meetings, but Teams harmed the performance of my computer so much during meetings that I was forced to focus on them. Heaven forbid if I had to be presenting (had to turn off incoming video for this to even be at all usable)! And, of course, one should assume if it's dragging performance down, that means the fans are going full speed the entire time. I have sensitive hearing, so I had to apply a power profile that turned down the fans without the computer overheating, which means lowering performance and making the Teams performance vampire worse. And this wasn't on a mac. This is not a mac only issue. I was so glad to learn my new job uses Slack, instead. It has its own set of problems, but it doesn't try to kill my computer.
• Agingcoder 4y ago
  I think I still haven't found a message/phone/video app that works. Skype is extremely buggy (crashes, freezes, regular ui bugs, loses conversations, etc). Teams is a resource hog, and is hard to search. Symphony is great for chat, but unpleasant for phone calls. I'm a bit surprised, since I'd expect it to be a solved problem. Any suggestions?
  • infinityplus1 4y ago
    Google Chat and Meet as well as Slack just work fine for us.
  • kroltan 4y ago
    I've had a good experience with Discord. At work we use it as our primary voice communication software, and it hardly ever has issues with audio quality. Screen sharing is also configurable, which is good as you can better decide where your bitrate goes. Sure, it's still Electron, but as far as Electron apps go, it's pretty responsive. Uses about 500MB RAM even on my personal account with literally hundreds of joined communities, some of them with thousands to tens of thousands of members. It also doesn't drop notifications and the read indicators are not insane. I still prefer Slack's text chat for business use, mainly because threads are frictionless to create, while on Discord they are more like "temporary sub-channels" where you still need to give them titles. But it's otherwise pretty good, and it has GFM-style highlighted code formatting.
  • Sateeshm 4y ago
    Zoom?
• lizardactivist 4y ago
  I have similar problems with all the popular apps for video and voice chat: Zoom, Teams, Discord. There is something very peculiar about it: I can have these apps running with literally no voice or video activity and all costly noise filters turned off, and while the CPU moves between 5-10% (which is still outrageous when nothing is happening), the fan will be running at max, and the battery drains fast. There is nothing else hogging the CPU, GPU, network etc. in the system, as the process explorer clearly indicates, so there is no reason for the fan and battery to do this. I keep concluding that there is some hidden process running in the system that causes this, and while I can never prove this, based on some thoughts and discussions by others, and the fact that it happens with video and voice chats, we suspect that advanced analysis on the audio input (voice analysis) is being done whenever the mic is turned on.
• onikolas7 4y ago
  Lets set a new standard: if it doesn't run on raspberry Pi don't ship it. Not running on a Pi should be a rare, special-case exception (e.g. need to train a model on GPU).
• amarraja 4y ago
  Not sure if electron is the issue, I believe vscode is based on it (I may be mistaken). Really wish they would sort Teams out. I like the concepts and product, but when in a video chat I have to close most apps. I tried opening a JIRA ticket whilst on a video call the other day... my quads still have the scars
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rienko 4y ago
  To me this happens when the CPU starts throttling due to high temperatures, if you don't have something like menumeters installed it probably won't show itself on any other native Mac GUI. For a long time the workarounds I've used to deal with this issue: 1) Charge from the ports on the right! The charging circuit on the left aggravates the issue. 2) Disable turbo charge by setting the mac into low power mode inside system preferences -> Battery 3) Raise the computer from the table for increased air flow, and not be in contact with latent warm from the table. Which has been heated by the mac itself. 4) Lower AC temperature 5) Change the Fan Speed from Automatic (default) to fullblast, or make it sensor based but lower the min/max temperatures for the fans to start spinning faster 38-60 celsius
  • ndrake 4y ago
    I was having throttling issues with a new 4k monitor. Teams seemed to make the issue worse. Pointing an external USB cabinet fan at the laptop has resolved my issues.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Teams is an Electron app. Hardly the first in line with poor performance. Why there is no better option than Electron in 2022 for cross platform UI apps is a mystery. (VSCode is a fork…)
• hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  Tangentially related but Teams also bricked my phone. Long story short: I didn't want to run Teams on my laptop as it was draining the battery super-fast, and I didn't want to install a work account on my private phone either, so I bought a cheap Chinese phone just for teams. It worked fine for 6 months just getting warmer a bit during meetings. But then I had a marathon of 3 meetings one after another and at some point it turned off and never turned on again. I bought another phone but now I make sure to turn incoming video off during calls.
• ngrilly 4y ago
  Happened today again on my Mac. Had to kill Teams twice.
• gambiting 4y ago
  Teams is hands down the worst piece of software I have used in my entire career. Not just because it's slow and resource heavy - the amount of bugs, idiotic design decisions, artificial restrictions and the constant wheel of changing features without giving the user any choice or say about any of them.....it all adds up. It's just an awful awful awful product.
  • P_I_Staker 4y ago
    I'm amazed by the extreme high quality of software that you've worked with. It doesn't come close to cracking any list for me. Tbh, I find it quite usable, with lots of useful features, and I can mostly count on it. It really doesn't do anything especially bad IME. Teams on Mac just doesn't work at all. It's astonishing.
    • jiggawatts 4y ago
      You’re on the “happy path”. A lot of Microsoft software is like this, where they imagined one type of user and for them the product is great.. E.g.: Teams is okay for Project Managers permanently employed at some (single) mega corp. For consultant developers switching between many clients, it’s a trash fire. Both scenarios should work well, but Microsoft simply ignored the second case. Why? Because it was designed by… PMs working at a single mega corp: Microsoft.
      • kortex 4y ago
        > Why? Because it was designed by… PMs working at a single mega corp: Microsoft. Wow. When you put it that way...yeah, this explains absolutely everything about teams. It bakes in so many assumptions about meeting flow as well. It's fine for ppt presentations but absolutely garbage for standups.
        • jiggawatts 4y ago
          In the Windows desktop world, you can understand a lot by realising that Microsoft developers almost never install and configure Windows "from scratch". They're given a preconfigured machine with a standard operating environment (SOE) image that has many small tweaks preconfigured. This is then connected to Active Directory and managed through Group Policy, which sets a bunch of configuration settings to sane values. In other words, the people developing Windows are using it like 10% of their customers do (large enterprise), not like 90% of the customers (random individuals for home PCs or small business). When I first realised this, a lot of little things suddenly "clicked" and made sense... Some random examples of this: Practically nobody at Microsoft gets given a PC or laptop with a HDR screen... so Windows does't do HDR properly. Practically nobody at Microsoft has to worry about backups (it's centrally managed), so the backup capability built-in to Windows is trash and constantly broken and/or left to rot. Everybody at Microsoft is "well connected" to the Azure cloud, so they assume every else is. Why not backup to One Drive? Uh.. because I'm satellite internet in the middle of nowhere! Microsoft developers don't have to manage the SOE and its deployment process, so the tooling around this is... "not great". Regional options, location, time zones, etc.. are all preconfigured and valid, so nobody at Microsoft thinks about what happens in "complex" cases... Like non-English-speakers using their products. Or being anywhere outside of the United States.
• pomatic 4y ago
  Install a windows VM. Run teams in the VM. Problems mostly solved, although teams is flaky when run natively under windows anyway.
• derjames 4y ago
  I use a Dell laptop from 2017 with an AMD E2-6110 Quad core, SSD, 8GB memory and Debian 11 with an extra screen attached to the HDMI port. In this laptop I have Teams-Preview v1.5.00.100453 which I use heavily everyday for work (calendar, voice, video and chat). Teams takes about 30 seconds to start but after that just runs very well. No crashes, no issues with sound or video. Everything is responsive considering a laptop with such a slow processor.
• solarkraft 4y ago
  A lot of hate for Teams in the comments. I don't like it either, but it's the best big Microsoft (end-user) app I'm aware of. It's not well designed, it is glitchy as hell - the other stuff is just worse. I was ecstatic when my work place added the calendar app to Teams because unlike Outlook that actually managed to do simple operations without freezing, crashing and reloading all the time. Big tech's software quality standards are appalling. It's as if your bank's elevators don't have walls and everything smells like piss. I'd also like to note that Teams calls are actually surprisingly stable and work better for me than most other options.
  • hestefisk 4y ago
    Hehe that’s an interesting allegory.
  • akira2501 4y ago
    Big tech isn't releasing software. They're loss leading market killers designed to destroy competition. The state of the product obviously reflects that. The frustrating part is those making purchasing decisions aren't typically sophisticated enough to notice this fact.
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  Interestingly, it works well on windows 11. Using it cca. 8-10 hours a day very actively and never really had any big issues, I recall maybe an issue of joining a meeting once in the past 2 years. However it's a very different experience for my mac-user colleagues.
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Lets have no illusions. Teams is the absolute worst I have seen for teams. Basically every other tool I tried worked better. However, Slack isn't that much better. It still gaslights Firefox users and tells them their browser is not supported. What a nice way to put it, that after friggin' years, they still have not managed to implement voice chat in a standard conform way. Discord and others have had this for years! Only Slack and Teams (in browser) seem to have incapable development teams behind them, who are comfortable with gaslighting unsuspecting users into using Chromium-based browsers, furthering web mono-culture. There are so many issues with Teams, that I am wondering, what they are even working on. Surely they cannot be bugfixing all day, if so many bugs remain after years. We've had 2-3 years of pandemic now. What the heck are they doing!? They could have made the business. Instead they shove this broken thing down our throats and time will come, when people will just run away screaming, just like they did with Skype. Another business opportunity of MS ruined by bad quality software output. Stuff like that should get banned immediately, before it can harm the web any more, than it already has.
  • duped 4y ago
    This seems unnecessarily toxic. Slack is an app first, not a webpage. Just install the app.
    • kelnos 4y ago
      You mean the "app" that's just a Chrome instance that wraps the webpage, and sucks up GBs of RAM while doing so? No thanks.
      • raydev 4y ago
        I leave it running continuously for weeks on my Mac, with no issues. It is currently using 700MB across all of its processes (5 by my count). Doesn't seem like that big of a problem. I understand it used to be a much larger problem. Maybe it's time to try it out again.
        • SahAssar 4y ago
• hestefisk 4y ago
  Amen.
• isusmelj 4y ago
  Not solved yet. I still struggle a lot with Teams. Ended up using the browser version instead. Used fine until today. Suddenly camera was not working and laaaagg. This is bad. Google Hangout and Zoom work fine. Since years...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• u801e 4y ago
  The online chat experience is subjectively worse in the last 5 years or so compared to how it was in the '90s, '00s, and early '10s. I don't have the issues the OP has, but I do have significant lag with text input when typing in Teams or Slack. This was never an issue with IRC clients, XMPP clients, or aol/msn/aim/yahoo/icq instant messenger clients. I'm not sure about screen sharing, but I do know that video chat was supported by later versions of the proprietary ones. At least screen sharing and video/voice chat works well on Zoom, even on Linux distros.
  • gpderetta 4y ago
    Worst part is Microsoft had Lync (not the post-skype reskin) which was a perfectly adequate office communication suite. The integration with the phone network was also quite nice.
• pdx_flyer 4y ago
  To be fair, Teams brings my Windows machine to a screeching halt as well. Macs aren't alone in the crappy Teams experience.
• dunham 4y ago
  For me, on an intel mac, the issue is overheating. The CPU will throttle down to about 25% once it gets to hot and everything gets laggy/janky. Teams seems to crank stuff up enough to trigger this. I've found that disconnecting the external monitor helps. (I'm guessing additional heat from the discrete GPU is part of the problem, but that is just a guess.) Probably wouldn't hurt to clean out the fans too. For my non-work laptop that had performance issues while hot (for non-teams reasons), I resolved the issue by buying an M1.
• Shadonototra 4y ago
  Teams is the definition of what's wrong with microsoft Nobody gives a shit anymore at that company I keep say the same shit, but nothing changes, they have major culture and hiring problems, at this point i'm not sure "major" is enough to describe how horrible it is They fire random people, and keep the problematic seeds, worse, they reward them!
• sixstringtheory 4y ago
  Back when I had to use teams I would try going on a VC and if Slack was also open, my battery would drain in about 30-45 minutes (on a new-at-the-time MacBook Pro) and be super laggy the whole time. Ever since then, as long as I’m not presenting, I’ll only call into video calls from an iOS device, regardless of whether we’re using Meet, Teams etc. It’s improved the situation a lot. Also I always turn off my video feed while others are talking. I never understand why on a call with hundreds of people, they’ll all be constantly uploading their live video stream. Seems wasteful and inefficient, maybe somebody could comment on just how much or little it really is.
• brokenkebab2 4y ago
  Teams is likely the worst communication software I ever used on any OS. It can't even consistently sync messages across devices.
• oregano 4y ago
  I had a contracting gig at MSFT a few years ago. I remember one occasion where I voiced some gripes about using Teams with some FTEs I worked with and receiving nothing but blank stares. I couldn’t believe they didn’t find Teams as frustrating as I did. Maybe they were just used to using crappy MSFT tech?
• Cyberdog 4y ago
  Remember Skype? How it could run in the background and get text messages and calls and not really cause any problems? And then Microsoft bought Skype, and every subsequent version just kinda got a little shittier? And then MS puts effort into MSN Messenger and other not-Skype things despite Skype having a huge established userbase for both personal and professional use? IIRC, they gave up with the later versions of Skype and used Electron for those too, but I still remember them being at least a little bit better than the absolute heap of shit that is Teams. I mean, it's almost like you have to put effort into being a shittier-than-average Electron app. Thankfully there is only one person inside of one client company who insists on using Teams. I couldn't imagine having to use it every day. I have to presume that nobody inside of Microsoft uses it… I can't imagine this shit is being dogfooded.
• marricks 4y ago
  You can use Teams in chrome on Mac and it works fine. I'd never let that tech touch my Mac. I have no clue how MS forced so many people to use that app but I'm glad my team uses something else.
• aaronyarborough 4y ago
  I've developed such a deep-rooted, passionate, magmatic hatred for Microsoft Teams that I'm now infamous amongst my friends for my mini rants. I'm a freelance software consultant, and many of my clients have their own Microsoft Teams Teams (?), and there's no easy way to join and switch between multiple teams using the same account. Typing is slow, and literally _everything_ else is too, and video calls regularly bring my 2019 i7 MacBook Pro to its knees. If a witch approached me and told me she could make Microsoft Teams disappear for good at the cost of severing a finger (presumably for a potion...I've got no idea; I'm a developer, not a witch), I'd offer her two for the trouble.
  • trinix912 4y ago
    Oh yes, that account switching thing is a pain... Their login page also redirects you a couple of times whenever signing in but I guess that's fine - it has to work with whatever custom security stuff Office365 customers have set on their instances. I just wish it felt less like a kludge.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  A tell that Teams and HN users mostly are Americans. The biggest problem with Teams is that the volume is too low. Every other service has some sort of volume normalization. Teams still expects mainly loud mouths! Every Teams meeting has this talk louder segment. Does not happen with huddle, meet, zoom and so on.
• geodel 4y ago
  Once I used Microsoft Office lens on iPhone for scanning some documents. It was absolutely confusing to use for a multipage document. It took me ages to figure out. After finishing that 10-12 page document, I had to upload on a HR website. However , it failed as total scan size was like ~100MB so above size limit. So I had to rescan whole thing with notes app in iPhone which finished in few min with only ~10MB of scanned document. Sure, there would be a detailed 100 pages of document on how to properly use it. But as a normal user I found it stunningly crappy, confusing and inefficient for my usage.
• borissk 4y ago
  Memory is so cheap nowadays. 64GB laptop memory on NewEgg are $149.99. Surely a very easy investment for anyone working in a company that uses Teams. Just refuse to buy laptops with non-upgradable memory. Having 64GB will solve all performance problems with Teams and other Electron apps.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    It's also a pile of shit CPU-wise when trying to actually do anything with it, so lots of memory alone wouldn't help.
    • borissk 4y ago
      You may be right, but that's not my experience. Chrome is very fast on modern CPUs if it doesn't have to use a swap file.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    For a couple years, until it becomes the new norm, and devs will assume that now they can ignore even more perf issues.
    • borissk 4y ago
      So you think stuff like C, C++, Java, Python, etc. should not exist and all code should be written in assembler?
      • int_19h 4y ago
        Writing stuff in C or C++ doesn't give you substantial perf benefits over assembler in most cases, so they don't belong to this list. That aside, no, I don't think we shouldn't be using higher-level abstractions. The problem is that we're using them without any consideration of performance impact at all, and increasingly without consideration of the actual cost/benefit ratio from developer perspective. For that matter, at some point, if you keep piling abstractions on, the amount of leakage from them all the way to the top layer is a tax on the developer operating on that layer - and that tax can, at some point, exceed the purported benefits of the abstraction. Do we really need to package a browser with every app just to make it easy to do (horribly designed more often than not) cross-platform UI? Or is it just the most expedient hack to avoid having to solve that problem properly?
• mywacaday 4y ago
  I'm rapidly losing faith in Teams and Microsoft, I've been playing with powerapps to have a function that adds a teams comment to Onenote to track actions that come in through chat. So far at least half the time the page generates in Onenote but doesn't sync any content, when it does sync the link back to the chat crashes Teams 100% of the time. Have tried the same link into email and that crashes Teams too.
• RajT88 4y ago
  I had the same issue with a Surface Book 3 running Win11. It seemed more pronounced after the Win11 upgrade. But it was still bad on 10. The eventual fix was switching machines to one with 32gb RAM. Smooth like butter now. Yes it is ridiculous that 16gb is not enough for day to day stuff.
• kposehn 4y ago
  I'm curious if anyone here on an M1 has tried installing the iPad/iOS version on their computer. I've done this for some badly misbehaving apps (Slack for example) and found it to be a significant improvement in performance, even if some interactions don't work as well. Caveat: It may require jumping through some hoops to load on a Mac and some infosec policies may stop you from using it.
• SigmundA 4y ago
  I run Teams 24/7 on both my current M1 Pro and old i9 for the last 3 years without "killing" my Mac. Yes the fans on the i9 ran when in a meeting not now on my M1. I use constantly and works well for our business for so many different things. It has steadily improved over time and performs pretty well as they have gone to newer electron versions and moved over to react from angular. Apple Silicon native supported is in beta and makes things even better for my M1. Safari is much more of a problem currently eating up 10+ gigs of ram over time "killing" my Mac requires a restart of safari to free up.
• cutler 4y ago
  Apart from the app itself ~/Library/Appliction Support/Microsoft/Teams was eating up 1.1Gb before I sent it packing to Trash. Same old Microsoft.
• INTPenis 4y ago
  For the last 2 years that I've used teams on Linux it has had a constant issue, even across Pulseaudio and Pipewire. If a BT headset is connected when Teams starts it never shows up in the device list. I always have to killall teams thrice, wait a while for some cache to expire , because otherwise I start Teams and it's still logged in for a few minutes and will disconnect the middle of a call just to logout, and THEN start teams. And today was another nightmare, people complained about my mic quality, so I did a test call, sounded fine, killall teams thrice, restarted it, reconnected to meeting, sounds fine now. wtf... And besides that today alone Teams malfunctioned in at least one other way I can't remember now. So I love that Teams for Linux exists, but damn is it shit. My co-worker in the same call today also runs Linux but he runs wired so he has no complaints.
• vijaybritto 4y ago
  I share similar frustrations and resort to Zoom for screen sharing because sharing screen with code editor is miles better on Zoom. I wonder why MS is not writing Teams in React Native, on which they pioneer for multiple platforms! Also these performance problems seem like the perfect fit for WASM. What a validation it would be for the tech!
• sublimefire 4y ago
  Teams crashed on my Mac when I was interviewing at Microsoft. In 3 interviews. Funny enough nobody understood my issue, but if you think about it only a small minority of folks have non windows computers in MS.
• mulderc 4y ago
  When I need to use Teams I just have it on my iPad and use universal control. My iPad basically turns into a Teams terminal during certain hours of the day.
• sswaner 4y ago
  Curious if I had a similar usage of resources. My experience hasn't been impacted, and I use Teams all day every day. The Activity Monitor line item for Microsoft Teams was not concerning ( 566MB of memory), but then searching for "Teams" showed a total of 5.4 GB of memory consumption for various Teams processes. Not cool.
• sgt101 4y ago
  This is not Teams; it's the last gen of Mac. There is a process (can't remember the name) that is kicked in when the temperature reaches a certain level. The job of this process is to turn down the processor. Unfortunately it consumes more more process time when it does this because it preempts everything. So the temperature goes up, which creates more interruptions and so on and so on. The core reason is that the temperature sensor is just next to the power supply and so is kicking in too early. The solution - unplug the mac. Let it cool down completely and then run it with the power plugged in on the other side.
  • astrange 4y ago
    This is false. Thermal limiting on an Intel Mac is indicated by kernel_task CPU but it isn’t using any power to do it.
• partiallypro 4y ago
  I've experienced this but with Slack. Slack always used to bog down my computer and randomly disconnect. My news company uses Teams and I've had very limited problems with it. The search on Teams though is genuinely awful and you can't find anything especially the context it's in. It's terrible.
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  So, everyone hates Teams, I can get behind that. But has anyone actually found out what Teams is doing in the background? Several people mention that Teams seems to be overloading the processor's I/O capabilities, but what is it doing exactly? What files is it writing to? I know the i9 Macbook's cooler doesn't come close to the thermal output of an i9 so it's unsurprising that an overloaded laptop will cause all kinds of problems, but I wonder how MS managed to screw up this badly.
  • sexy_seedbox 4y ago
    From other comments, it seems like poor AngularJS implementation and excessive Telemetry slowing everything down.
• pulketo 4y ago
  mine was killing my linux laptop, so I decided to open teams in chrome and i works well
• pronik 4y ago
  Slack has been great for my company for about seven years now. There is a feeling that the development stalled a couple of years ago, probably due to Salesforce, Teams' market sweep and struggling to keep up with Discord's feature set, however, Slack still feels very polished for me -- a long time ago I've tried Mattermost and immediately noticed quite a lot of "paper cuts", tiny problems like wacky keyboard focus control that would be ignorable if I didn't know that Slack gets them right. Teams is a nightmare. Don't get me wrong: I like Teams just because it's not Office Communicator/Lync/Skype for Business anymore, i.e. I can actually chat with people, but it's abysmal in every other way. Just today, I tried copy&pasting a quote, so I typed in "> ", the quote box appeared, but I couldn't leave the box anymore (to add a comment to the quote). Moving around with keyboard, clicking with the mouse didn't help. I tried inserting a couple of empty lines before pasting and noticed that I can move down in the text with the down arrow key, but the up arrow key would switch me to the "edit previous message" mode. And this stuff is everywhere and I'm not even talking about elementary stuff like being unable to stay logged in into different workspaces in different browser tabs at the same time. I'm happy to be using Slack right now and it pains me immensely that their fate is basically set, since their enterprise market share has been mostly eaten by Teams, they are way behind by user count and it will get even worse with Google Chat on the rise (which probably sucks too, but haven't tried it).
• ragebol 4y ago
  I really don't understand why Teams is so frikkin' popular. Anyone who ever used something else than Teams before the pandemic knows how bad a chat app it is, but since eg. management folk never used that stuff before the pandemic but now had to also WFH, they already had Teams from day 1 (M$ pre-installs it I guess, Linux-only guy here), so they forced that horseshit on everyone. There really is no other excuse for it being the default in many cases these days. But it's absolute terrible. /rant
  • Turbots 4y ago
  • wjamesg 4y ago
    Because it’s free with M365
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    Teams' primary market is big, legacy companies who are already typically forcing shitty (often Microsoft-based) tooling on their employees who don't have any say in it and are forced to use it (and may not have the confidence to resign because of that). Think companies where the primary browser used to be Internet Explorer 11 until somewhat recently. Before Teams you would've typically seen Skype For Business there, so I guess compared to that it might be an upgrade. Employees there may never have used anything better so they don't realize how bad it is, and because the other tooling they are forced to use is just as bad, Teams doesn't particularly feel like an outlier. That is Teams' target market and it excels at capturing it.
• Komodai 4y ago
  > This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time but Microsoft is slowly killing it with Teams. Made me laugh
• kurupt213 4y ago
  I have the same Mac but with 64 GB of memory and run windows in bootcamp and teams does this to my system
• mikestew 4y ago
  Any new user to Teams on macOS will almost instantly be exposed to how little Microsoft gives a shit the first time they Cmd-Tab to Teams. Haha! Where's your focus now, loser? Between that, and the beachball that appears because I dared type :) and it's trying to...what the hell is it doing? Go find smiley.jpg in your bag of resources and throw in the stream of bytes, how could you possibly fuck this up, Microsoft? $DEITY, I hate Teams.
  • deadcat 4y ago
    Odd, I just tested this and it worked correctly.
• muhaaa 4y ago
  Microsofts way to say: buy a windows laptop!
• dellIsBetter 4y ago
  The version of teams for Linux sucks too!!!
• dathinab 4y ago
  What is fascinating about Teams is in how many different ways it fails for different people and setups. I mean things like the electron app being behind the chrome web view (even through it's not much more then a web view and doesn't really add anything) is not surprising. Like I have seen one or two cases of "uh teams fucked up my Laptop I have to restart", including with the electron app. Many cases of "oh today teams decides to not allow screen sharing for me, this morning it did work?" (which then also randomly works again sometimes just by rejoining the call). Also many cases of audio/mic randomly being terrible until you restart (through that might be the fault of chromes auto mic level adjustment). My favorite is that when you hard switch of a mic it decides to warn you with a huge banner that you are muted ... but doesn't set your icon on muted. Which looks a lot like "we want to listen in even if you mute so please don't mute the mice on the OS level". Also it sometimes randomly mutes you, like when you join a call (in chrome) to fast it hadn't yet loaded the "default mic on" setting so it's off (which for someone muting their mice with a physical button is just terrible UX). But besides all it it still works better then Slack or worse Zoom in my experience. I mean it at least does work somehow most of the time even if with bad UX and drawbacks. While Zoom in my experience sometimes just doesn't work at all (on Linux/the web app). And in Slack if the connection is sup-par it's de-facto unusable. EDIT: The most ridiculous is that they all decide to just not work on Firefox independent of weather Firefox supports the necessary APIs. In difference jitsi works in general better and on Firefox, which I could use it more.
  • evilduck 4y ago
    > Which looks a lot like "we want to listen in even if you mute so please don't mute the mice on the OS level". This is due to the "talking while on mute notification" feature. Disabling the mic by hardware or at the OS level breaks that feature. It certainly smells like a privacy concern, but the number of people who talk while on mute is also astoundingly common (myself included).
• forinti 4y ago
  My youngest used Teams for school for most of the pandemic on an old Core 2 Duo laptop with 2GB and later 3GB of RAM. Mind you, it ran on Ubuntu Mate and used about 1GB of RAM. I'm not saying I like it, but it didn't fail.
  • akira2501 4y ago
    Thankfully the 1.4 version of teams is still available on Linux. That version actually works on my system. If I install a 1.5 release, I can use teams for 25 seconds, and then it crashes.. and restarts, so I can get another 25 seconds, and the cycle just continually repeats.
• gerdesj 4y ago
  "Is anyone at Microsoft Listening?!?!?!!" Why would they listen with a capital L?
• cjensen 4y ago
  Funny thing: I use Teams on an i9 MacBook Pro 16" and _HAD_ this problem. The issue is that if an i9 overheats, the ONLY symptom is that the CPU slows down and you will never know this happened. No report about heat is generated. For me, the issue happened with Teams plus an External Monitor. An External Monitor lights up the discrete GPU and then it didn't take much CPU usage to push the system into slowdown mode. Fix was a Genius Bar appointment to have them open and vacuum dust from inside the 2 year-old MacBook Pro. It's back to being perfect.
• albertTJames 4y ago
  Litteraly no issues on my M1, except for the team chat design.
• worewood 4y ago
  Electron and other web-site-as-desktop-app frameworks are a cancer that needs to be killed. It may have some legitimate uses but developing a communications client is not one of them. Did people forget how to properly program for the desktop?
  • physPop 4y ago
    Yes. Script kiddies want to use javascript everywhere and desktop apps are dinosaurs. I wish it weren't that way. Maybe the lack of a good, widely adopted cross platform toolkit is to blame? Its a really hard problem though...
• jmspring 4y ago
  The Teams organization had little interest in performance optimization. They spent more time cramming more features in. It seemed like, at the time, the Teams org valued feature creep for promos over actual stability and performance.
• hemantv 4y ago
  This is called distribution. Microsoft moat is average products with above average distribution. I e sales and marketing.
• MollyRealized 4y ago
  Title: "Teams is KILLING my Mac Every Day" MS Community Manager: "I've updated the title of your post to stay within our community guidelines." Hm. :)
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  I read somewhere that this is because MS Teams uses Electron which is an end-user-hating memory pig.
• k_sze 4y ago
  Even on Windows, MS Teams is garbage in terms of core instant messaging UX: - it has a massive lag in syncing messages after your computer wakes from sleep or after re-signing in - switching accounts is, again, unreasonably slow whereas Slack and Discord allow you to keep multiple accounts logged in at the same time. - no triple-backtick code block syntax - no true fullscreen video in the desktop client
• diek00 4y ago
  After reading this I uninstalled teams on my Mac and a bunch of annoyances have ended. The main one, the text on tabs in sublime text are no longer distorted. This alone was driving me crazy for months
• deadcat 4y ago
  This is a strange thread for me. I have a 2021 16" Macbook pro. I use Teams every day, and have some long meetings. The memory use is about 1Gb. I have no issues with it. It is snappy and performant.
• chmod775 4y ago
  If you asked me what I hated most about my job, I would tell you it is Microsoft Teams. I'm using Teams on three different devices and it's broken in a different way on each of them. Teams on my phone will randomly stop receiving notifications. The Teams app on Linux crashes when I try to open a video posted in a meeting on it, and it will also remember that location, so when I re-open it, it immediately dies again. Also I'm pretty sure that in Firefox voice calls were working like a week or two ago, then Microsoft decided that it's not supported again. The Teams app on Windows lets you select between two different "away" statuses on the tray context menu, but one seems to crash Teams. I may be confusing it with the behavior when I hit the close button on the Teams window, and it just silently crashes: The window disappears but the tray icon stays there like a smug little fucker, pretending Teams is still running until you actually try to click it. And those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Teams is mandated by our parent organization, but people use random other stuff amongst themselves, because Teams just doesn't work. There's some people who set up discord servers for their group, others are using an old slack server the company forgot to shut down, and there's probably people using whatsapp. Teams is like a mail man who calls in sick every second week, throws letters that he doesn't feel like delivering away, and also tries to make smalltalk for half an hour when all you want him to do is deliver your damn letters.
• denysvitali 4y ago
  Check out my projects, PRs are open! https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-frontend https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-frontend https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams_gui https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams_gui
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I don't know WHAT you people are smoking. The use of Teams at my company was so successful that IT leadership partnered with Microsoft reps to relaunch the product so that it could be even MORE successful. I don't know about you, but my favorite part is the forced clearing of chat history after 24 hours, and I really appreciate that Microsoft has become so successful by giving job-justifying IT managers at Fortune-sized companies such fine-grained "security" controls over how their product is used internally.