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I have a very new Mac and it seems far too slow to boot in both Catalina and now Big Sur perhaps it’s worse.

Device : MacBook Pro 16 inch (MBP 16.0) CPU 2.3 8 Core intel i9 16GB DDR GPU Intel UHD Graphic 630 / AMD Radeon Pro 5500M SSD 1Gb

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I bought in July a MBP 16.0, from the first time I boot I had a very slow boot

  • UFI was very slow (the screen remain black and the Apple logo won't show up before a good 17 secs)
  • the full boot time is over a minute start to finish
  • nothing in the user login item at all (no apps launch)

The long EFI is very frustrating too as I want to press the power button a few times thinking I missed the button but no.

I’ve researched and resetting the NVRAM/PRAM and SMC have shown no improvement in start duration.

Any idea where the issue is from?

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  • Also, don’t worry if some people react with down votes to anything complaining or critical - this can get cleaned up with an edit later once we all know what’s up. A good answer or two will reverse the tide and lots of people will find the post useful over time is my hunch.
    – bmike ♦
    Sep 18, 2020 at 12:31
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    If you're switching between OSes or system volumes, then restarts can take longer. Occasionally some restarts may take time while some 'housekeeping' is being done. But if this is happening every time, then that's different. As it's a new Mac, I'd take advantage of Apple's Support.
    – benwiggy
    Sep 18, 2020 at 12:42
  • If you've had issues from the very first boot why didn't you take it back to Apple and have them look at it?
    – user3439894
    Sep 18, 2020 at 13:08
  • thanks your, honestly I lost faith in customer support, I will have a deeper look in the next few days hopefully I figure out something
    – Kevin
    Sep 19, 2020 at 10:23
  • We got you, Kevin - it’s common to dread talking to support. They always want to do the quick fixes since they really work (for most cases). Tier 1 support is still useful if you are prepared, happily run through all their checks, have specific details. They want to get you to tier-2 as soon as their job is done and they’re sure the quick fixes are all satisfied, too.
    – bmike ♦
    Sep 19, 2020 at 10:53

1 Answer 1

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I wish I had that fast new gear, but if I were to triage this, I would do some tests with FileVault enabled and FileVault disabled and [avoid the power button. It would be super frustrating to have a slow boot and I’m sure with some tests, there’s a reason why it’s slow and figuring and then solving that technical detail would be satisfying indeed.

As to the process to quantify this startup, use something other than the power button. Use lid open to wake, press any key or connecting power and also use a camera to time things (or narrate while recording to a watch or phone.) Make sure you test no FileVault and automatic log in on a clean erase / install with nothing connected save the Apple power adapter if you suspect hardware being the cause and not software you loaded. Then enable FileVault, and let it finish encrypting and repeat the test. It will pause for you to log in, but you can subtract that delay later - it shifts the boot order on you.

Then once you’re sure the timings are repeatable or know the variance, boot to internet recovery and erase everything and reinstall the latest shipping OS and note that build number once booted. Since you’re on beta, you might have pre-release bridge / firmware and need to wait for that to ship if you want to have Apple look over the logs to see if a repair is in order.

I would not use any install method other than internet recovery and erase install in this case, that ensures you get any bridge, firmware updates slipstreamed into the install process and you do depend on Apple to clean up in the coming months since you hopped on the beta train. If there is something amiss, it should be pretty easy to compare with other similar models and know yours is as fast as them or not. Great work on the 17 sec time - that’s one item to benchmark, but looking at the log files and collecting extra data points might help.

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    Thank you for the reply, I did some video alright (using the wake lid) but I need to look deeper for sure. I'm a huge fan of encryption but weirdly I never enabled FileVault for this device as I was surprised with the boot time unencrypted. -- since the last OS update I have a huge improvement, still slow though but the boot time until the Apple logo shows up is must faster, so I might wait for the golden master which might solve everything. thank you again.
    – Kevin
    Sep 19, 2020 at 10:36
  • Wonderful, and FileVault really alters the boot order. See my edit - there’s some caveat there and it makes the boot software side happen after you log in so you can easily distinguish the hardware pre-boot times from the OS load times @Kevin
    – bmike ♦
    Sep 19, 2020 at 10:47

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