I have one and hate it with a passion. A MacBook Air bought new in the past 3 years should be able to use Teams (alone) without keeling over. Takes over a minute to launch Outlook.
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.
Indeed, I have a 15-year-old desktop computer that is still running great on Linux. I upgraded the RAM to the maximum supported by the motherboard, which is 8 GB, and it has gone through three hard drives in its life, but otherwise it is pretty much the same. As a basic web browsing computer, and for light games, it is fantastic.
It also performs pretty well for the particular brand of web development I do, which basically boils down to running VS Code, a browser, and a lot of ssh.
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.
Is it an Apple silicon or Intel machine? Intel macs are crazy slow - especially since the most recent few versions of macOS. And especially since developers everywhere have upgraded to an M1 or better.
You could certainly still buy new intel macbooks 3 years ago from Apple. Plenty of people did - particularly given a lot of software was still running through rosetta at the time.
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.
Yeah it's such a shame how much the performance has been affected by recent macOS. I kept my 2019 Mac Book Pro on Catalina for years because everyone else was complaining... finally upgraded directly to Sonoma and the difference in speed was night and day!
Sounds a bit like my Intel MBP, in particular after they (the company I work for) installed all the lovely bloatware/tracking crap IT thinks we need to be subjected to. Most of the day the machine runs with the fans blasting away.
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.
I will pile on on MS Teams. I am on a Mac and periodically have to fight it because it went offline on me for some reason and I am no longer getting messages. Slightly less annoying is when my iPhone goes to sleep and Teams on my iPhone then sets my status to "Away", even though I am actively typing on Teams on my computer.
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.
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.