MacMini Core Duo start up time

Sat, 4 March 2006

Earlier this year someone posted a video comparing G5 and intel iMacs, booting next to each other where G5 was very slow. This has prompted me to run my own test on my 20″ G5 iMac which showed that G5 in that video was seriously below it’s normal performace. Here is the article I posted in January.

Basically, the G5 iMac in that video was a real dog, booting in 98 seconds while Intel iMac booted in 37.9 and my G5 iMac booted in 40.8 sec. A few other tests suggested boot times very close to my results but I’ve also seen a few people in forums claiming their Intel iMac boots in just under 30 seconds. I haven’t got any Intel iMac to try to replicate that.

macmini.jpg

Yesterday I’ve got the new Mac Mini delivered, stock Intel Core Duo 1.66 GHz with 512 MB RAM. After playing with it for most of the evening (evenings sometimes last until 3 am) I noticed the little thing is very snappy and fast computer. I rebooted it a few times and noticed that it was a very fast, actually extremly fast to boot. So I decided to run the test on it, comparing it with my G5 iMac (Rev 1, G5 1.8 GHz, 20″ and 512 MB RAM)

Like in the first test I measured the time to specific events; Mac sound, Apple logo, Starting OS X and finally ready to use (when the clock in the menu bar is displayed) Stop watch again was a good old Sony Ericsson T630 mobile phone and I ran the test number of times to get more accurate results.

To make sure computers are properly booted I would power the computer down, wait 30 seconds and then power it up.

I firstly booted my G5 iMac 5 times and got the results very close to those two months ago. Then I booted the Mini 12 times and again, not to many discrepancies, times were very similar each time. In the end, I’ve got the following average results:

Event Intel iMac
January		 G5 iMac
January		 G5 iMac
March		 Mac Mini
March
10.4.4 10.4.4 10.4.5 10.4.5
Mac sound 4.5 3.5 3.6 4.0
Apple logo 6.7 15.6 15.2 10.2
Mac OS X 31.9 34.4 34.9 22.8
Ready to use 37.9 40.8 41.6 25.8

25.8 seconds ! Wow, this is seriously fast start up. I’m yet to run some comparisons in performance between the two but the start up of the Mac Mini is simply amazing.

Yes, I know, boot time doesn’t mean much for overall performance of the computer as some G4 powerbooks boot faster than Intel iMac, but some people like to do this kind of comparison. Pretty impresive anyway.

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23 Responses to “MacMini Core Duo start up time”

  1. JimXugle said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 11:25

    You Have Been Digged. http://digg.com/apple/MacMini_Core_Duo_boot_time_25.8_seconds

    I’m not really an apple fan, even less so with the switch to Intel.

    Now imagine what you could do if you could make somesort of flash media the boot device… my guess would be around 2-5 seconds.

  2. cobr@ said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 11:34

    22 sec on an intel centrino 1.6 with 512 ram. in windows that also has linux installed on it, so grub is in there as well. not that impressive. only will it be important if there is the possiblity that there will be dual booting later on.

  3. Geekboy said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 11:42

    I think doing a comparison between a duo core processor versus a single processor is a bit deceiving and pointless. You are going to get a quicker boot time just because the machine is duo processor machine. If you are going to do such a comparison, you should’ve used a core solo machine. You got to compare apples to apples, mate!

  4. Cows that Moo. said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 12:21

    25.8 Seconds? lol. My intel iMac Core Duo boots in under 10 seconds and even loads programs on startup. If you are like OMG with 25.8….seek help.

  5. bravghede said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 12:29

    cobr

    22 seconds to boot windows. Ooooooh…The only problem is that when its all booted up your in windows. I don’t care how fast a centrino 1.6 can boot a four year old operating system. Plop down a still yet to be released Vista beta on that bad boy and then make a negative comment about apples lowest end mac booting their 2006 OS. I can turn on a commodore and its up and running instantly… only 64k of ram. Or how about I tell you how fast an old tandy machine will boot dos 2…. BAH!

  6. Bryan said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 12:42

    WTF?

    You people seriously need help.

    I’ve got a dual 1Ghz P3 PC from 2000 that boots to a fully useable OS in 11 seconds from a cold start.

    Of course, it runs BeOS…

  7. Mike said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 13:05

    Hey, it beats the boot time on my Gateway M275 tablet. It clocks in at about 15 minutes. Were these test all done with a clean build of OS X?

  8. Kent said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 13:09

    BE OS! YAY! Forget OSX! Lets all get wet about an hobbyist OS that died in 1998, but WILL BOOT IN 11 SEC on P3 class hardware! Excuse me while I throw out my macs in shame……..

    Actually, BE is cool, but how is BE OS pertinent to the topic at hand? I think BE fan who try to boast about boot time in an OSX in intel thread needs help or more BE OS forums to boast in….

    I’m curious to see how OSX and its bundled apps run on intel hardware. Looks promising so far.

  9. Mike said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 13:49

    “Geekboy: I think doing a comparison between a duo core processor versus a single processor is a bit deceiving and pointless. You are going to get a quicker boot time just because the machine is duo processor machine. If you are going to do such a comparison, you should’ve used a core solo machine. You got to compare apples to apples, mate!”

    You will notice that there is an Intel iMac in the comaprison table and that one runs Intel Core Duo processot at 2.0 GHz, while mini in the test is on 1.66 Core Duo. Look up the results for that one - Apple to Apple.

    As for having Core Solo - as soon as someone donates one for testing purposes I’d be happy to do it. But for now my cash cow just ran out of milk :-)

    “Cows that Moo: 25.8 Seconds? lol. My intel iMac Core Duo boots in under 10 seconds and even loads programs on startup. If you are like OMG with 25.8….seek help.”

    Plain and simple - I don’t believe you this one. Intel Core Duo boot anywhere between 35 and 40 seconds. Unless you are getting it out of sleep mode of course, but we’re talking about cold boot here - power off, wait at least 30 seconds and then press the button.

  10. Tech news » Blog Archive » MacMini Core Duo boot time 25.8 seconds said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 14:02

    [...] read more | digg story Posted by Igor Filed in Miscellaneous [...]

  11. zeke said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 14:36

    Until we see sub 4 seconds instantaneous startup time, you guys are doing nothin more than flashing your weewees to see whose is bigger,…

    Most geeks I know dont care because they leave their systems running for days if not weeks and most laptops are left on hibernat of some sort but thats really where startup time matters, work related laptops..

    We lost power last week and my wife just realized now what the grub loader looks like. We’ve been dualing booting since August and she never saw the damn computer start-up.

    Does anyone know if there has been any work done on flash based booting like Jim above mentioned?

  12. Jim Pitts said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 14:53

    Interesting comparison.

  13. Bitperbit - Actualidad y Tecnologia hoy » Blog Archive » La nueva Mac mini arranca en 25.8 segundos said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 14:58

    [...] Vía: SilverMac [...]

  14. Wesley Walser said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 15:28

    You got dugg, so most of your comments are going to be pointless negative trolling. Don’t worry, thats the condition of digg, not your tests.

    I found the article very informative.

  15. evilgod69 said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 16:21

    yeah, it would be nice if you could re-run those tests with fresh installs of osx & equal versions of osx (eg using 10.4.5 on all machines), i can’t seem to find a changelog for osx, so i can’t really say if that will cause much of a variation.

  16. djfelixm said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 19:52

    Dude, good job as someone already said it, keep doing your tests, people are just retarded most of the time. My PowerBook G4 boots in 20 sec with 2Gig ram, but I don’t care I never shut it down unless I need to restart for an update. BeOS and Tandy and that entire junk, go ahead boot those till you are green in the face. His little machine is faster and that’s all that matters. Haters man seriously deficient and socially inept, why don’t you go knock on his door and tell him that to his face, the internet allows cowards with stupid criticisms to post on sites like this. Mike keep up the good work and enjoy your machine, the rest of you enjoy whatever it is that you boot. BTW my pocket calculator boots in les then 1/2 a second :) sweet huh? Idiots.

  17. chris howard said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 20:30

    Wow! All those figures make my not so old PowerBook look dead slow.

    I’ve got a Titanium 1GHz with 1GB RAM and OS X 10.4.5. My times are:

    Mac sound: 2.9 seconds
    Apple logo: 20.8 seconds
    Mac OS X: 1 minute, 13 seconds
    Ready to use: 2 minutes, 38 seconds

    (Don’t ask me why the chime is so fast!)

  18. Praxis22 said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 20:59

    Bah! losers the lot of you :) You want reall speed try QNX.

    From floppy drive seek to login prompt in 2 seconds, and that’s after it loads the OS from the Zip insider card that mounts the SCSI disk the OS is loaded on. The boot loader itself is on a small IDE disk, since only QNX will recognise the SCSI hosts adapter once the kernel is loaded. This is on an old 486 DX50 with 32Mb RAM.

    That said my PC will boot to desktop in about 20 seconds or so. Not that I’m a windows fanboi, I’d love to “play for the other team” if I could find a cheap powerbook. Long have I lusted after one. I may even be tempted should vista be too controlling with DRM up the wazoo.

  19. Praxis22 said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 21:06

    In all fairness I should point out that I paid 1000 UK pounds for the full version of QNX (before the RTOS ever existed) So it’s not cheap, but it is very good :) and yes, I was surprised as hell the first time I powered it up.

    It takes another 2-3 seconds or so to bring up X-windows once you actually login. (buying a developer licence for that is the reason it was so expensive :)

  20. Jauhari said: Sun, 5 March 2006 at 21:26

    It’s amazing that intel MacMini boot very fast, I love it, does Mac Book Pro boot fast too?

  21. Chris said: Mon, 6 March 2006 at 01:00

    Very interesting Trivia.

    My 5 year old PowerMac (G4 400MHz, 640 MB Ram, 7200 RPM HD) just booted a recent install of OS10.4.5 from a cold start in 45 seconds. The old PowerMac still holds its own with safari & mail but it drops off from there. If only it were actually half as quick as those fine Macs in your comparison!

  22. Tim said: Mon, 6 March 2006 at 06:18

    Is boot up time interesting to most people.

    I question how often people actually boot there machines. The only time I reboot a mac is for software updates and the oh-so-rare crash. My iBook has been on for about 2 years straight. I put it to sleep, but I don’t turn it off.

    Wait, I think I turned it off once when I went on vacation.

    Do other people turn off there computers everyday?

  23. Make The Switch » Mac Mini Gains Acceptance said: Mon, 6 March 2006 at 20:55

    [...] The Mac Mini Core Duo has some initial impressive boot up times. Why would you not want to have one of these little power houses? People have already tore into the Core Solo versions and have started to upgrade them. Heck, Windows has already been booted on a MacBook Pro, so it is only a matter of time on the Mac Mini JOKE. You can also read an excellent article/review on the Core Solo version from ArsTechnica. They run through some benchmarks, which are not that bad, but they show how the MacBook Pro is a stronger machine at this time. For an entry level Mac, you really cannot go wrong with it. Maybe I should consider getting one of those as well as a MacBook Pro! [...]

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