championed its new chips' performance and efficiency, this had to be taken with a grain of salt, because a slew of third-party applications would not run natively at launch. The processing architecture of Apple Silicon is different from that of mainstream Intel and AMD processors, and developers needed time to update their applications to the platform.
Common computer processors from the likes of Intel and AMD run on a type of chip architecture called x86, which is by far the most common and relevant chip architecture today. However, Apple Silicon and its M-series processors run on the ARM platform. It's the same architecture that powers most smartphones and mobile devices, housing many processing units and components on a single chip. Due to the sudden shift to Apple Silicon in 2020, traditional computer applications were not designed to run on ARM platforms. Instead of running natively, the programs first ran through an emulation layer to Apple Silicon computers.
The version of Microsoft Teams for Apple Silicon will be rolled out to all s during a period that will last a few weeks, per the With a native Apple Silicon application, this emulation layer is removed, and more processing power is freed up for other tasks. Microsoft also says that Teams s will see a performance improvement when using multiple high-resolution monitors during video calls.
How To Get The Apple Silicon Teams App Early
To skip the incremental rollout of the Microsoft Teams application for Apple Silicon, s can get the software early through the s running the official build of Microsoft Teams will have to wait until their application is updated through the incremental rollout, every running the public preview will be updated to the correct version of Teams. After the rollout is completed, each Mac will automatically be updated to the application designed for their system — Intel Macs will use an x86 application, while Apple Silicon Macs will use an ARM application.
For s who already have the Microsoft Teams application installed on an Apple Silicon Mac, there may be issues when updating to the newest version. Since it is installed via an upgrade rather than a fresh , macOS may still think the application needs emulation. To correct this, find the Microsoft Teams app in the Finder and click on it with two fingers. This will open the properties window, where s should make sure 'Open in Rosetta' is unchecked. Rosetta is Apple's x86 emulator, so unchecking this box will tell the system to run Microsoft Teams natively for Apple Silicon. With the updated Microsoft Teams app, Apple Silicon s will be able to utilize an optimized version of the application for the first time.