I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from login than my Mac.
With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).
Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my password.
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
Some hardware is MUCH slower than others.
Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting and not interacting with the windows partition?
And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good points.
Best just disable the feature.
Windows has alot of stuff that runs in sequence that takes awhile to churn or times out. It’s much better than it was, but Apple is way ahead.
I see some people think they have fast booting windows PCs but I am sure also they know that's not the case for the average PC
Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.
For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)
I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the CPU.
I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable to load as much before the user can put in their password.