macOS Monterey takes 25+ minutes to boot

Yeah having same issue. All the recommended troubleshooting and cleaning did nothing to help. Tried going back to Big Sur but could not create the start-up disk per guidance. Also had problems recognising external drives which too 5-10 monutesl. Reinstalled Monterrey after cleaning the hard drive and seemed a bit better but still seems to have a dead spot half way during the boot. Definitely should not have upgraded; Big Sur was fine. Ughhh… hope Apple breaks out a bug fix soon. It is very aggravating.

Same problem here with a Imac 5k late 2015 with a modified NMVe ( Evo 970 ).

Installed Monterrey 3 days ago and today when I had to restart it, it got sucked, I re-in stalled Monterrey and it still getting 15-20 min. to restart, which used to be no more than 30 secs. First I thought it was because of the modified NVMe but after getting in to this post, I see there are a lot of people having the same issue. As I keep my IMac on 24/7 I will wait for a solution.

went from a wonderful Big Sur install to Monterey and my awesome Mac mini became a sludge of a machine. I welcomed the .1 version follow up, assuming that there would be a fix, but I could not install it despite 10 days of trying. After five or 6 hours it stuck on “15 minutes left” and never finished. I let it go for several days once same result.

I took it to Apple and they took it up to the .1 release but it is a slow slug of a computer again. I don’t know what to do. I am considering having a private company wipe it and install Big Sur.

My Mac Minis are all Apple from the wall outlet to the WiFi, no third party SSD, no external drives or non Apple hardware. It was fast under Big Sur. I’m wondering if Apple is now compiling to the M1 chip and adding an emulation layer underneath to emulate the Intel instructions. Whatever it is, I now have two struggling Macs and I actually had to run out and buy a cheap Samsung Galaxy Windows 12 notebook. Fortunately I was able to Cronosync a ton of data to a Synology NAS and have been working around the clock to get the laptop set up for my minimum needs. Right now I consider my Synology NAS to be my main storage and am limping along with the Macs and the Samsung Win 12, using the Win 12 for anything super important.

I always expect some bugs but this is not an alpha level release, let alone a beta.

After this I will never again be all Apple and have learned not to rely on Mac proprietary file systems, Apple proprietary technologies and most importantly any Apple proprietary tools or backup solutions. I had thought that I had an excellent data management backup strategy and I have not lost data, but it has been astoundingly difficult to migrate it. I will be looking into solutions which do not rely on proprietary storage such as iCloud, One Drive and the like. I definitely have some long term projects here to get my data off of my devices and replicated to secure widely accessible nonproprietary storage solutions.

Honestly, that is not true and you are only doing possible harm with that advice. Every Mac should have an antivirus package. Apple releases numerous security patches in the life of each macOS release. Every one of them solves numerous security holes.

With that having been said, Macs are a very small installed footprint in comparison to Windows on Intel, so of course they are targeted with less exploits.

I hear ya. The number of times I have mulled this over in my head as well the past year and whether to make the painful jump. It's remarkable how Mac computers slow down, iPhones and iPads that are only 5 years old can't run the latest software, how Apple keeps changing connectors, how the prices remain high.... I have a Mac from 2008 that was configured to run as a mixing station for a studio project. That thing boots as fast as my 2017 iMac and runs just as smooth. It just can't keep up with system software updates that, really, haven't added much since then.

We always think we're progressing with the "latest". But with Apple, it feels like we're going backwards the past few years. They're really their own worst enemy.

Yes your experience and all the other problems with Intel based setups certainly seems to point to Monterey being built primarily for M1 systems. If it's not, then it's even worse than we thought!

I was considering porting my C# iOS app to Swift and investing more in Apple, but am now having second thoughts. Do we really need the added pressure of worrying about a MacOS update every year?

We went through the pain of being forced to upgrade from Power PC to Intel and had to retire a £2000 MBP early. Now it's Intel to M1, what's next? How much is it all going to cost? It'll be M1 to something else in a few years, it's like groundhog day. Forever firefighting and paying Apple and not getting on with work. My wife still uses MacOS Mojave as she doesn't want the hassle of upgrading and the disruption it causes. Says it all really!

Will look into Synology NAS, I've recently found out the hard way how flakey Time Machine is.

Suppose it's common sense not to have all eggs in one basket really, but so easy to get lured into the Apple ecosystem especially when they've become so good at marketing. I find MacOS much easier to work in and less easier to trash than Windows, but am ever hopeful that Microsoft will up their game. Maybe it's time to try Windows 11?

Actually I did have to buy a Windows 11 laptop as my older Mac Mini happened to suffer a hard drive crash just days after I had updated Big Sur to Monterey. I’m used to hassles with macOS updates, but totally bricking a formerly great

I now have 2 dead Intel based Macs… one from a drive failure and one from an update to an alpha level macOS update to Monterey. 3 genius appointments were no help.

These are not toys to me… I am now rethinking our decade+ dependence upon all Apple technology. The Windows laptop is now out-working our 7 Apple devices. The things which I had not realized was that Apple itself could destroy my main Mac, with nor recovery option, and how difficult it can be to recover data to a Windows machine from Apple.

I am now rebuilding our home technology infrastructure and will be backing up data to external encrypted NTFS file systems as well as to Apple proprietary file systems. Vendor lock-in is only acceptable when the vendor does not pull the carpet out from under you.

I’m quite likely to limit our Apple dependency to iOS devices. I feel cheated.

The same thing here with iMac 27, 2017 with Samsung T5 external drive. I had to bring it to Apple, they did reinstall on a new T5 external drive. It was OK for 2 days and now the same thing. Complete boot taks aorund 15 min. It looks like that I will be giving up on Mac and go to Windows 11.

My Intel based Mac Minis wouldn’t update, so I purchased an M1 MacBook Air. I spent 5 solid days with Apple Tech Support and Apple could not get keychain on the MBP to turn on. Maddeningly the Rep leaves you and calls back every few hours so it takes 5 days to work with Apple for 5 hours. So I returned it. I took one to Apple Genius support and they kept it overnight and did get it to upgrade to the second version of Monterey, which was every bit as slow and unusable as the first Monterey.

I had a third Apple Genius appointment to downgrade the machines back to Big Sur or Catalina. It turned out that Apple will not do that, despite what the Apple call center rep promised. I’m very disappointed in Apple. Dead in the water, I had to buy an emergency Samsung Windows laptop which I had never thought that I would ever do. To my surprise it was a whole lot snappier and faster than either of my Mac Minis had ever been.

With no credible path forward and no access to most of my Mac backups (external drives with proprietary Apple encryption with keys in Keychain), I was facing what turned out to be a 4 month effort to get back to being my old organized self. I use a Synology DS411 RAID with Time Machine enabled, but that does no good without an Apple Mac with Keychain. Thankfully I had the foresight to also make backups to the Synology Time Machine (or any backupS. I never lost data I sure did have a devil of a time weeding through 8 TB to find the data of record.

The moment hat I had a Windows laptop installed with the basics and could again work I decided to rebuild the two Mac Minis. First step was to buy two 2TB SSD drives from Crucial. I searched for a local tech company who could replace the old drives and install Catalina, the last stable macOS that I had run. I hadn’t cared for Big Sur as Finder became hopelessly Byzantine with that release.

So now In my 5th month of recovery, I do have two working 2TB SSD Mac Minis with 16 GB RAM. I have ChronoSync backing up between the Mac Minis and to the Synology RAID array and also the Synology based Time Machine service.

I am NOT going to back up Apple encrypted external drives as I learned the hard way that when Apple breaks, your Apple encrypted external drive backups are inaccessible. I also learned that you cannot even reformat these external drives with your Mac. But it turns out that good old Windows on a laptop can, so I have formatted them to NTFS file systems.

I will keep these Macs (with their Parallels Windows VMs), but all of my backups will be going to industry standard formats. I will never go to M1 machines and I will only use industry standard file systems and encryption. I am probably also going to move towards Windows laptops with Virtual Box or VMWare. I will never again find myself trapped by Vendor lock-in.

Update:

Success! After a year of slow restarts/logins following an update to Big Sur from Catalina my iMac (27-inch 5K 2019) w/ 1TB Mac HD Fusion Drive is back to ~30 second startups now with Big Sur. And it only took two days. Basically, after the macos Recovery failure with reinstalling Big Sur, I ended up having to erase the Mac HD again and could only install Mojave , so I decided to install each new update/release after that up to Big Sur.

I think 15 years of updates, new releases, and migrating to new iMacs also contributed to this issue, at least with my situation.

I have never had issue with boot time with my late 2015 imac , not with the internal drive or my external boot drive i use on a daily bases now. its quit zippy , and i never see anything under a 20 second boot up speed sure thats slower then the internal mac drive but its small. and not so low that it's unusable, makes me wonder what is on these other system that cause the slow boot up speed.

I'm in the same situation. I have a Portable SSD T5 on which I installed my OS. It works well with Big Sur, but with Monterey it is too slot. Boot time > 30 minute.

Current solution is continue using Big Sur until Apple will fix Macos Monterey aka the worst Apple OS ever released.

Few months ago, I bought 2 TB SSD and tried to install Monterey on it...

And now after few months of waiting I tried again..

" 2 hours left", then 11 hours, and finally installation got stucked.

So I guess situation is still the same, "non Apple" external SSD is not working properly with Monterey?