Silver iMac boot up time
Sun, 19 August 2007
In January 2006 I wrote an article about boot up time of the very first Intel iMac. Some guys published a video on YouTube, claiming that intel iMac boots in under 40 seconds, while a G5 iMac takes just about 100 seconds.
I thought the results were somewhat unusual, so I ran my own test and came to much closer results. In the table below, you can see the times for the G5 iMac in that video (v G5) and the intel iMac (Intel) the same guys used. These are followed with the boot up times I have achieved with my G5 iMac, which shows that Intel iMac was only marginally faster to boot, and that the video was inaccurate, to say it nicely.
Fast forward 18 months to August 2007 and my brand new silver iMac is shining in all its glory right in front of me. It’s a base 20 inch model with 2GHz Intel processor, filled up with 2 GB RAM and running OS 10.4.10.
So here are the results, the new silver iMac is a screamer when it comes to boot up time - up and running in 25.8 seconds.
| Event | v G5 | Intel | My G5 | Silver |
| Mac sound | 4.5 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 3.0 |
| Apple logo | 25.5 | 6.7 | 15.6 | 10.1 |
| Mac OS X | 1:21.6 | 31.9 | 34.4 | 24.4 |
| Ready to use | 1:38.0 | 37.9 | 40.8 | 25.8 |
The times are measured with the mobile phone stopwatch (SE K610i), and averaged over 6 boot ups for the final score.
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The Closet Entrepreneur said: Mon, 20 August 2007 at 07:16
I totally believe it. I’ve run a few tests on my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (Santa Rosa chipset) and have clocked a 32 second boot-to-ready time — and that’s INCLUDING the time it takes to type in my password at the login screen.
trainwrecka said: Mon, 20 August 2007 at 12:20
Ummm… wait a few months on that time. My Core2Duo iMac was blazing fast when first purchased. After loading programs and normal computer use over a few months the boot got really really slow.
Simon Montreal said: Thu, 23 August 2007 at 05:32
Trainwrecka: if you run repair permissions (utilities/disk utilities) or even Onyx (WELL recommended), that will help you clean up your system. And it’s free.
Jason R said: Wed, 29 August 2007 at 03:13
I find my silver iMac bootup time to be the fastest of any computer I’ve ever owned. I’m very happy with it. This is my first Mac, so I’ve nothing to compare it too…