I don't recall the exact numbers, but I swear the PowerBook with Snow Leopard, or maybe the old G4 with leopard, was booting in well under a minute, perhaps 25 seconds to boot up and another 10 seconds for log in. I think I enabled automatic log in at some point just to time it.

Anyway fast forward a decade later, SSD which are 10 times or more faster than hard drives. Machines have multi core CPUs, also much faster. Yet you boot a modern Mac and it doesn't seem much faster. Or maybe I lost my patience...

I seem to recall Snow Leopard being pretty fast to boot.

[sarcasm]Try booting your new Mac with its fast SSD in Snow Leopard and see how fast it is.[/sarcasm]

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AllGold
I seem to recall Snow Leopard being pretty fast to boot.

[sarcasm]Try booting your new Mac with its fast SSD in Snow Leopard and see how fast it is.[/sarcasm]

[serious]You could boot it as a virtual machine[still serious]

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space-time
I don't recall the exact numbers, but I swear the PowerBook with Snow Leopard, or maybe the old G4 with leopard, was booting in well under a minute, perhaps 25 seconds to boot up and another 10 seconds for log in. I think I enabled automatic log in at some point just to time it.

Anyway fast forward a decade later, SSD which are 10 times or more faster than hard drives. Machines have multi core CPUs, also much faster. Yet you boot a modern Mac and it doesn't seem much faster. Or maybe I lost my patience...

First off, no. It used to take a couple of minutes to boot a Mac.

Second: Nowadays it depends on the Mac and the OS and the amount of RAM, but booting from internal SSD will blow away booting from internal HD every time.

...In my experience, iMac Pros take a very long time to boot. Nearly a minute to boot to Mojave. A bit longer to boot to Catalina. Slowest boot-time of any currently-shipping Mac. 32GB of RAM.

But they're the exception.

I worked on a bunch of 2018 SSD iMacs running Mojave today and not one took more than 19 seconds to boot. A couple of them were running High Sierra and they booted so rapidly that they were at the login screen before I could grab my hand sanitizer to clean my hands before moving from one Mac to the next. 32GB of RAM.

...If you have more memory, it will add some time to the RAM-check when your Mac boots.

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I can remember the parade of extensions loading prior to OSX at boot time.

IIRC, it could take several minutes for a mac to boot back then.

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freeradical
I can remember the parade of extensions loading prior to OSX at boot time.

IIRC, it could take several minutes for a mac to boot back then.

Mac OS 9?

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Ahoy Conflict Catcher!

That could be tedious.

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freeradical
I can remember the parade of extensions loading prior to OSX at boot time.

IIRC, it could take several minutes for a mac to boot back then.

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RE:up
Ahoy Conflict Catcher!

That could be tedious.

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freeradical
I can remember the parade of extensions loading prior to OSX at boot time.

IIRC, it could take several minutes for a mac to boot back then.

Oh yeah, having to use Conflict Catcher was a real joy...

Expensive too...






Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2021 09:40PM by freeradical.

2014 13" MBP with 12/250 GB SSD sitting on my desk right now boots in about 25 seconds to Catalina password screen.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

This has not been my experience at all. I've now moved two macs (a mini and an MBP) to SSDs from spinning hard drives (one just last week) and the boot up experience for both has been astonishingly faster.

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

Yeah, SSDs much quicker for me, always.

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“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in."

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space-time
Yet you boot a modern Mac and it doesn't seem much faster. Or maybe I lost my patience...

Since replacing the spinning component of my 2012 iMac's Fusion drive with an SSD, it now fully starts up (complete Desktop) in approximately 23 seconds.

I have two almost identical Macbooks, vintage 2006, running Snow Leopard. One has an SSD, the other is a regular hard drive. The one with the SSD boots much faster than the other.

2012 Mac Mini i7 2.3, even with two HDD in RAID 0 takes notably longer to boot then a 2014 Mini with a dual core i7 and SSD

The Mac Book Pro M1 boots in a couple of seconds, tops

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"No Comment"

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rz
I have two almost identical Macbooks, vintage 2006, running Snow Leopard. One has an SSD, the other is a regular hard drive. The one with the SSD boots much faster than the other.

my observation is about new Macs with SSD and modern macOS versus old Macs with HD and early versions of OS X.

Reboot?

What's that?

$ uptime
 09:53:35 up 9992 days, 47 min, 45 users,  load average: 0.23, 0.16, 0.17

/i may have edited this for comic effect.

I tell you what, I've got a Macintosh SE/FDHD, and a floppy disk with Apache Strike, and man that thing boots up fast. Probably not loading a full OS, but still. Impressive.

My old Hackintosh with an SSD literally boots up in a few seconds. My Mini took a LOT longer.....

My SE/30 with 50MHz cpu upgrade will boot os6 in a blink of an eye, after the smiley Mac appears.

Bloat, bloat, and more bloat later, my 2.9GHz i7 MBP takes almost a minute.

Surfing the net with the SE/30, though...I’ll take the bloat and extra minute of startup time of the MBP.