Any reason why my rMBP is taking so long to start up?

Oh man, what a bad luck... If you exchange it you'll probably get an LG screen... Sorry, but I literally LOLed...

 

Run a series of tests on the SSD to check for speed variances. CrystalMark can help you with that task.

 

Perform the Apple Hardware Test:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

 

Not sure if this could be your problem, but its happened to me a few times:

I do a nightly clone to an external USB drive. Sometimes when I restart if the USB drive is attached, it boots from the clone. The first time it did this I was confused because it booted and ran slower and the files I'd worked on that day were missing as well as a few settings I'd changed and programs I'd installed. Then I figured out I was running off of the clone from the night before. I detached the USB and rebooted and everything was running lightning quick again.

Hope you figure out what is happening and get it fixed!

 

Have a look at you settings; System Preferences Start up Disk, if it`s set to Network the system can be very slow to start from the internal drive.

 

make sure you don't have any external drives connected to it during start up... else it will attempt to read all bootable 1st (detecting if your external is bootable or not) before actually starting up...

 

What are the results of the tests we asked you to run?

 

I am not in front of my Retina now, however i do know that if Network is selected the system will search for the network drive and the start up time is delayed waiting the null response. As nothing was selected the system may have been going through all boot options prior to starting from the internal drive, this would likely result in aprox 30 sec delay in boot time on top of the SSD`s time

 

No actually it tends to be opposite to what you have suggested.

OP, long shutdown times tend to occur when you leave an application (or a couple) open while trying to shut down. Make sure you have quit all applications and your shut down times will be like 4-5seconds all the time.

 

The internal drive should be selected, so it may be no more complex than this as the system is now responding consistently. I rarely reboot my Macs, so i don't have a good number for booting 10 - 15 sounds about right for the Retina, depending on what you have starting up.

 

You need to run a verbose boot and check your shutdown / start up logs!

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492

There is currently an annoying bug in ML that shutdown log in console is not working, in verbose mode I often see shutdown monitor shutting before the shutdown process completes.

Verbose mode will show you what is causing your shutdown to hang, and for example Parallels often causes multiple process kill requests to hang.

I tend to always run with verbose mode enabled:

Code:

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

to revert back to non-verbose mode:

Code:

sudo nvram boot-args=""

 

Thinks for this piece of wisdom. I was having kernel panics on my new rMBP. Try this when I get home