Boot Time in M1 MacBook Air?

[gdourado]

Hello, hope everyone is doing well.

In the beginning of the week I purchased a M1 MacBook Air.
It came with Monterey installed. I updated to Ventura, then used the option to Erase all content and settings and did the setup of the Mac.
I didn't do the full drive erase and usb install of Ventura like I used to on intel Macs and instead tried the much faster and easy EACAS.

But now I thin the MacBook is taking to long to boot.
I timed it and from the moment I press the power button to the login screen is 14 seconds.

For comparison, I have a Windows Laptop I use for work. It is an older Acer with an intel i5 8250u, windows 11 and it boots up faster.

So what I am asking is if this boot time is normal on the M1.

Thanks.
Regards.

 

[Toutou]

My M1 Air 16/256, FileVault enabled: 12 seconds from keypress to login screen, then another 9 seconds to desktop.

I'm pretty sure I've seen longer boots on this machine, I remember noticing that nothing has really changed since my 13" MacBook Pro on Mavericks.

edit: second try, 13 and 8 seconds. So I'd say there's nothing wrong with yours.

 

[Lab34]

Hello,
if it's bothering you, you can just put it in sleep mode. I'm amazed by the ultra low battery consumption in sleep mode on my M1 pro. And the ability to be instant ready is so magical.

 

[leman]

Windows is specifically optimized for fast boot which is achieved by essentially partially hibernating the machine instead of shutting it down. Resuming from hibernation is fast but can also lead to issues with initialization and security. MacOS performs full hardware initialization and self-test on boot, which is why it takes longer.

That said, these new. Acs are designed to be put to sleep instead of being shut down. They resume from sleep pretty much instantaneously. They also use very little power while sleeping. Of course, it’s up to you how to use your computer, but if you insist on turning it off every time you don’t use it you are missing out on a major feature that makes these computers so good.

 

[Corefile]

That said, these new. Acs are designed to be put to sleep instead of being shut down. They resume from sleep pretty much instantaneously. They also use very little power while sleeping.

This ^. I think I only reboot my M1 Air upon SW upgrade.

 

[kschendel]

Agree with the others re sleep. Uptime on my rMBP is 16 days and it's only that short because I shut it down completely for my last trans-atlantic flight home. On the rare occasions that I do reboot it, I think it takes 10-ish seconds to get to the login screen, and another few seconds to stabilize the desktop once I do log in.

 

[1BadManVan]

My Mac literally loses 1% overnight in sleep mode, no need to shut it down. The screens already on and ready to log in before im even done lifting open the hinge lol

 

[Tagbert]

Hello, hope everyone is doing well.

In the beginning of the week I purchased a M1 MacBook Air.
It came with Monterey installed. I updated to Ventura, then used the option to Erase all content and settings and did the setup of the Mac.
I didn't do the full drive erase and usb install of Ventura like I used to on intel Macs and instead tried the much faster and easy EACAS.

But now I thin the MacBook is taking to long to boot.
I timed it and from the moment I press the power button to the login screen is 14 seconds.

For comparison, I have a Windows Laptop I use for work. It is an older Acer with an intel i5 8250u, windows 11 and it boots up faster.

So what I am asking is if this boot time is normal on the M1.

Thanks.
Regards.

From what I’ve heard, Windows often does more of a suspend and restart rather than a full shutdown and restart. That gives it an (artificial?) fast start time.

In any case, it is going to be hard to compare two different systems and they do different things on startup. This won’t tell you if your MacBook is setup correctly or not. Maybe comparing against another MacBook would give you some idea.

Startup time is one of those odd, pseudo-stats that people sometimes use to measure performance mainly because it is something easy to measure. In reality most of us don’t restart our machines very often and a few seconds more or less will have no true impact on our ability to work.

 

[Ben J.]

Restart on my 2020 M1 Mac Mini: about 15 seconds from chime to desktop shows.
I also don't shut down my mac unless I need to. I'd say your laptop is on par.

 

[Ben J.]

Another thing; startup times these days have as much to do with fast internal PCIe flash disks as CPU power, I think. Maybe even more.

 

[tmoerel]

Another thing; startup times these days have as much to do with fast internal PCIe flash disks as CPU power, I think. Maybe even more.

Detecting external hardware (USB/Thunderbolt/Displays/etc.) also adds to the startup time!

 

[Bodhitree]

Strange, my M1 24” iMac boots from button press to login screen in 4 seconds, and then to an empty desktop in another 3 seconds. Fastest booting computer I’ve owned.

 

[tmoerel]

Strange, my M1 24” iMac boots from button press to login screen in 4 seconds, and then to an empty desktop in another 3 seconds. Fastest booting computer I’ve owned.

But now add a Thunderbolt hub, some external harddisks, an extra screen........and see how it all gets slower!

 

[Bodhitree]

Good point. I do have an external Samsung T7 2TB SSD on the system, but no other peripherals.

 

[Tagbert]

But now add a Thunderbolt hub, some external harddisks, an extra screen........and see how it all gets slower!

then you are at the mercy of the response time of whatever peripherals you have connected so no way to generalize that and useless as a metric.

 

[tmoerel]

then you are at the mercy of the response time of whatever peripherals you have connected so no way to generalize that and useless as a metric.

What metric? I never gave a metric. I am just stating that external devices cause variation in boo times. This is not a generalisation but an empiric result. It tells you that we all have different experiences as we all have different setups!
A theoretical boot time metric is too subjective to matter.

 

[Tagbert]

What metric? I never gave a metric. I am just stating that external devices cause variation in boo times. This is not a generalisation but an empiric result. It tells you that we all have different experiences as we all have different setups!
A theoretical boot time metric is too subjective to matter.

Agreed. This thread was started because someone thought that the boot time on their M1 Mac was too slow. There is a long history of people comparing boot times and using that as a proxy of performance metrics even though, at least in modern times, booting is rare, boot times are fast, and as a measure it is pretty much irrelevant.

 

[Ben J.]

this is going sideways. I'm out.