[marcan_42]

Just to follow up, it's about 16 seconds on a MacBook Air. 7 seconds of that are iBoot, and 9 are macOS. If you turn off the startup chime sound (which is a checkbox in system settings), that cuts out 2 seconds of iBoot time and makes it 14 seconds total.

For comparison, a ThinkPad X230 running Arch takes 7 seconds to GRUB (which I skipped through as fast as possible), FDE unlock prompt at the 12 sec mark, and after typing in my password it takes a further 13 seconds to get to a graphical login prompt (so 25 seconds total time).

Honestly, adjusting for the fact that Linux does fewer things before the FDE unlock than macOS, and more things after it and before the login prompt (I've got a few extra daemons and thing installed), I'd say they're quite comparable. The MacBook is a bit better (2s faster firmware without the chime).

Of course, half the point of these machines is they can run weeks while in sleep mode (or even while powered on as long as the CPU is idle and the display is off) and they have practically instant wake. So boot time isn't really relevant, since you rarely have to shut down.

[Wowfunhappy]

> If you turn off the startup chime sound (which is a checkbox in system settings), that cuts out 2 seconds of iBoot time and makes it 14 seconds total.

Lol, wait, so the startup chime blocks the rest of the boot process?! I would have expected the system to be working on booting while the chime was playing.

Now I'm not sure whether I should keep the chime turned on. I like the chime, but I'm not sure I want to pay two extra seconds for it. :)

[marcan_42]

I think it's mostly that by the time the system is ready to play the chime, it takes less than two seconds to do whatever is left before transferring control to iBoot2, and of course you can't leave audio playing as you call a new piece of code... so even if the playback happens in the background, it would still have to wait for it to finish.