Short boot times and Apple Silicon

[Shirasaki]

Windows has a penalty with performance that increases with how long you have it on, I have to shut down at least once a week so things don't go haywire. I restart my Mac once or twice a year if that...

Heh, I find myself needing to restart my Mac every so often. I did manage to let Mac run for 60 days straight, but that was just putting it in sleep mode and rarely using it. After that, Mac became barely usable and I needed to restart. It's an Intel Mac so not sure how M1 would affect things but whatever. As for Windows, I could easily let it run for weeks if not months while doing various tasks, and only restart if I need to troubleshoot or something goes horribly wrong. Guess everyone's experience varies greatly.

 

[seble]

Biometric auth has never been available after fresh boot for any Apple device as a matter of security, and tap to click is off by default and something that needs to be turned on per user profile (and rightly so because tap to click sucks and only current and former PC users seem to be used to it anyway). Why do you think it would work at the login screen, given those things? This isn't a matter of "not all services are running at login." Anything that is a system LaunchAgent or LaunchDaemon has already loaded by the time the login screen appears.

Edit: looks like I had already been beaten to this

Mac user of 15+ years here. Still use tap to click.

It's a work smart not hard idea that first time users don't understand. It's called a touchpad for a reason and not a clickpad. MacOS implementation of the double-tap to drag doesn't automatically release so not as smart as Windows implementation and MBA M1 touchpad isn't sensitive enough so often it's more of a slap to tap rather than touch to tap but still better than archaic click to drag.

click and drag is a pain as is the tap to drag, but enabling 3 finger drag is an absolute game changer...

 

[Stratus Fear]

click and drag is a pain as is the tap to drag, but enabling 3 finger drag is an absolute game changer...

The first two are what I hate about tap to click mode, as well as I get spurious clicks about half the time when I have to lift and place my finger back down to continue on a long movement across the screen. But I have never tried the three finger drag honestly. Might look at it.

 

[JKAussieSkater]

My 24” iMac is a 16 GB ram / 512 GB hard disk spec. The first time I booted it up it was slower, there was a whole setup process to go through. But since then it’s been 5-7 seconds to cold boot, and near instant to wake with Touch ID.

According to this other guy I'm quoting below, it seems that the size of your SSD may impact startup times if FileVault encryption is enabled (which I think it is by default these days?). My 1TB is double your size, so maybe that's the culprit.

Boot time may be influenced by FileVault. Decrypting the disk at startup can take a while.

@Bodhitree:
But I doubt it's any libraries or extensions installed, since this was an out-of-the box scenario, only doing Apple updates. I gave the machine to somebody as a present, actually, and helped them set it up. So I'm not sure what was going on.

Perhaps there's a booting caching system that needed some time to actually cache? Maybe the computer boots faster now, I'll have to ask the owner.

 

[Alameda]

Are you actually shutting down your machine that often ? I am just putting it to sleep , the M1`s barely use any power @ idle , never knew it was a thing, maybe I am doing it wrong !!!

This.
The OS is so stable and the standby power consumption so low that Sleep is the way to go.

 

[Brandon42]

I’d be curious about any RAM checks done during a cold boot. I know the M1 on chip memory is fast, but I would still be curious to know if there is a noticeable difference in boot times for 16GB vs 32GB

 

[MacHiavelli]

Does boot time really matter that much? M1 can't even be truly shut down anymore (anytime you open the lid the computer turns on, which is not the case for my old Intel MacBook Air).

Does:

sudo nvram AutoBoot=%00

not work?

 

[Shirasaki]

Does:

sudo nvram AutoBoot=%00

not work?

Never tried that but auto boot doesnt bother me much cause I never used any mac released between 2016 till 2020 M1 mac.

 

[seble]

The first two are what I hate about tap to click mode, as well as I get spurious clicks about half the time when I have to lift and place my finger back down to continue on a long movement across the screen. But I have never tried the three finger drag honestly. Might look at it.

I believe it’s available in accessibility. It’s something I set up instantly on any new mac that I get, definitely recommend.

 

[spiderman0616]

Not even Apple can make "this" do "that". I actually think my M1 Air boots up quicker than my iPhone, honestly. Wake from sleep is what Steve Jobs was talking about, and the Mac achieved that feat Pre-Apple Silicon

 

[Bodhitree]

Not even Apple can make "this" do "that". I actually think my M1 Air boots up quicker than my iPhone, honestly. Wake from sleep is what Steve Jobs was talking about, and the Mac achieved that feat Pre-Apple Silicon

Maybe it is what Steve Jobs was talking about, maybe not. IPads and iPhones are not meant to be switched off, while a lot of people still power down their Macs regularly. Boot time on a Mac matters more than boot time on an iPhone. Although, my new iPhone 13 boots in about 7 seconds.

 

[VitoBotta]

My M1 mini takes definitely longer than 5 seconds to boot. Like quite many more seconds but I haven't measured it.

Boot time may be influenced by FileVault. Decrypting the disk at startup can take a while.

This could be the reason then.

 

[zarathu]

I timed my base model M1Pro this morning: 7 seconds. Of course, from sleep is instant, but I’ve started shutting down at nights now because of the memory leak problem.

 

[glindon]

My C2D 15” 2008 unibody coldbooted in 5 seconds flat on Snow Leopard with a 840 pro SSD. Nothing that came after (running newer OS) ever topped that (at least 10s)

Im not counting windows, because their “fast startup” is cheating (sign out user sessions + hibernate)

My first modern Mac that I bought was the original 2010 11” MacBook Air with a wimpy 1.4 C2D, paltry 2gb, and tiny 64gb SSD and that sucker booted snow leopard in a few seconds. So fast that there was no progress bar and just a brief glimpse of the Apple logo. Loved that machine as it was the perfect writing companion. Really hoping the 11-12” comes back with Apple Silicon. The 12” MacBook (I owned the 2016) never had the “magic” of that 11” Air.

 

[mr_roboto]

Boot time may be influenced by FileVault. Decrypting the disk at startup can take a while.

Nah, that's not how FileVault works. Data "at rest" (on disk) is always in an encrypted state. Everything happens on demand: whenever a disk block is read into RAM, its contents are decrypted, and whenever one's written out, it's encrypted. Performance overhead is low because Apple uses hardware accelerators.

The only special thing which happens during startup is that the user's password must be used to decrypt a special block on the disk. It contains the FileVault volume key subsequently used for on-demand encrypt/decrypt. Since the volume key is a very small amount of data, it takes almost no time for your computer to go from "I have the user's password" to "I know the volume key and can start booting".

 

[theorist9]

Fast restarts would be nice. I have to reboot my MBP daily to keep it from freezing/panicing. When I do that, I almost never have a problem. But if I don't do this, it usually freezes on day two.

Used to be once/week was fine, but when I switched to WFH, which requires I be on a VPN all day, I had to switch to daily restarts.

I've had instability with all three of my MBP's, even when they were new (but with the 2008 and 2011, they at least went a month before freezing/panicing). By contrast, with my PowerMac G5, I never had an issue, even though I rebooted only about once/year.

No one has ever given me an explanation for any of this, though an Apple Care advisor told me an Apple Care engineer said weekly reboots are a good practice.

Having said that, my whole experience with Apple laptops has been unusual. All three required complete logic board replacements (under Apple Care, fortunately). The first was due to an NVIDA GPU issue (which was commonplace), but the last two were because of thermal issues. IIRC, my 2nd one had its logic board replaced twice for that reason.

 

[jdb8167]

Does:

sudo nvram AutoBoot=%00

not work?

No it doesn’t do anything on an M1 MacBook.

 

[mi7chy]

MBA M1 cold boots in 16 secs without FileVault compared to 8 seconds for $400 Lenovo Yoga 6 convertible.

 

[VitoBotta]

Can anyone with the M1 mini comment on how long it takes for their minis to boot? Like I said earlier mine takes much longer than the few seconds many of you are saying but in most cases they are MacBooks. I have the mini hooked to two displays and filevault enabled. It takes about 30 seconds to reach the desktop.

 

[macintoshmac]

I have to say, one of the most transformative things of my 24" iMac has been the short boot time. My older Macs and before that PCs all had significantly longer boot times, from about 25-30 seconds and longer. The habit was always to switch the machine on and go make tea, and by the time you came back with your tea you'd be at the login screen, and then after logging in it would take another 5-10 seconds to initialise the environment.

With my M1 iMac, all that time has just disappeared, its now just 5 seconds from boot to login. I barely have time to settle in my chair and the machine is ready to go. And that initialisation time is down to 1-2 seconds, almost unnoticeable.

It changes the way you use your computer. I find myself switching the computer on more often, in situations where before I might have used my phone. Shopping for instance, if I go exploring online I can do that on my phone but its very much nicer to do it on the big screen of the iMac, but for the sake of convenience I did it on my phone. Now its much easier for casual computing tasks to switch the computer on, it reduces the friction in the interaction.

It is funny that my 16" MBP 2021 boots faster than the iPhone 13 mini. It never was the case ever. Now, my computer boots quicker than the iPhone. We have truly upped the ante with Apple Silicon (ARM).

 

[colinsky]

Can anyone with the M1 mini comment on how long it takes for their minis to boot? Like I said earlier mine takes much longer than the few seconds many of you are saying but in most cases they are MacBooks. I have the mini hooked to two displays and filevault enabled. It takes about 30 seconds to reach the desktop.

26 seconds for me. 16/512 m1 Mini, two 27" Dell 2560x1440s and an LG 5K 27".
No Filevault.

I mention the displays because I heard that the OS has to inventory every pixel during startup, so having more pixels could slow it down.

 

[VitoBotta]

26 seconds for me. 16/512 m1 Mini, two 27" Dell 2560x1440s and an LG 5K 27".
No Filevault.

I mention the displays because I heard that the OS has to inventory every pixel during startup, so having more pixels could slow it down.

That's more similar to my boot time. Thanks