Microsoft Microsoft has announced plans to launch a native version of Microsoft Teams on Apple Silicon, but the launch isn’t going to happen overnight. In a blog post on its website, Microsoft claims the update will provide a “significant performance boost” to Mac users with Apple’s M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra and M2 chips. Teams has only been running as an Intel app via Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs since the start of the Apple Silicon transition in 2020. Direct competitors Zoom and Slack have offered native Apple Silicon support since December 2020 and February 2021, respectively. This was a highly requested feature by Microsoft users. A user-submitted feedback item on the topic six months ago has since been upvoted more than 3,000 times. However, despite the long delay, the release of Teams for M1 and M2 Mac will be a slow process. Instead of offering a universal binary right now with the announcement, Microsoft announced vague plans to automatically roll out the update “to customers in increments over the coming months.” (Members of Microsoft’s Insider program have had access to a native version of Teams in beta since April.) When Apple released the first M1-equipped Macs in late 2020, we wrote about how impressed we were with Rosetta 2 — in most cases, many users wouldn’t even know they were running legacy Intel versions of their apps instead of Apple Silicon- native versions if they weren’t called. However, users can expect native software to be more efficient, and we’d expect nothing less from Teams. Many other major software packages have been updated to run natively on Apple’s new architecture over the past couple of years, from Adobe to Unity to Microsoft’s Office suite and beyond. But Teams likely won’t be the last to make this move, as there are a few chokeholds left – even among the biggest.
