At a time when practically all work meetings are held by videoconference and we depend on them more than ever to communicate with family and friends, it is important that its quality be as high as possible. Otherwise, there is a curious option that we can try, an option that could help improve its performance.
FaceTime, Zoom, Google Meet and more
Whatever tool we use to make video calls, we need a good internet connection. And a good internet connection does not only depend on the speed (which can be measured very easily), any error in the configuration also comes into play as well as latency, which we can measure with the ping.
Whenever we want the best quality in a video call, the recommendation goes through close other applications that may be consuming resources of the connection, but some system services may also be related to it. That’s what this twitter user is suggesting, because according to what he posts, location access by the Maps app can negatively affect latency.
FUN FACT: I just did another round of “what makes my Zoom calls stutter every 60 seconds” and this time the culprit was… APPLE #!*$ING MAPS. That’s right, Macs now come *preloaded* with software to ruin wifi latency 🙁
You can fix the problem by revoking Maps location access in Preferences: pic.twitter.com/w2rJWY23cY
— Ben (hiring 73/∞ teammates) (@benskuhn) May 12, 2022
Personally, I could not reproduce the results. Attempts were made on a 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Pro running macOS 12.4 RC. Even so, it’s a resource we can investigate, as we might have some surprises.
It is true that with this option disabled we won’t be able to access our location in the Maps apptherefore, if it works on our computer and improves the quality of video calls, it is a good idea to reactivate it when we end them.
