Running Microsoft Teams in Parallels on Apple Silicon

GeekyOnion@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 11 points –

Hi folks!

I’m thinking about getting a Mac Mini M2 Pro, but I want to find out if people have had poor experiences running things like video calls from Teams in a guest OS. A couple of people I’ve talked to use the MacOS client for Teams, but I want to keep the accounts on the Windows install isolated from the host.

Anyone have perspective on the video and audio quality?

12

... another option: you use the web based Teams.

If you want more isolation, you could have a dedicated web browser for it.

Of course, the web version of Teams has a few annoying limitations (you can only see 4 people at the same time, opening multiple tabs to Teams kinda breaks it, etc), but it is endurable.

It at least performs better in browser than as a desktop app, for me at least.

from what little I know about virtualization I am reasonably sure that you can pass through the mic and camera to the guest windows VM and it should perform as if they were native

Sounds like an esoteric thing to do.

To begin with; Teams isn’t a very friendly thing to run in the first place.

Then you want to run a virtualized windows instance, multiple maybe even, so that you can run Teams in these instances?

Would that be x64 windows? Virtualized, running on Rosetta, on an ARM CPU?

I guess if your only goal is to find out, sure.

But if you want to virtualize windows, why start with a mac?

I know someone who took a CPU out of the socket with the system “running” and then put it back in and resumed operations.

Sure, it can be done. But everyone else will just unplug the power and be done with it.

In the meantime I can wholeheartedly recommend Apple Silicon, but Microsoft’s software is still the worst stuff that I run on my mac.

Also, you can just use Teams from the browser if you don’t need any integrated features.

There is an ARM version of Windows and there is probably Teams for it.

Hence why I asked the question ;)

Doesn’t make it a much better proposal as ARM Windows is (still) severely limited/unsupported.

It is. I did wonder given I run the MacOS version on my M2 Mac mini just fine.