macOS Monterey takes 25+ minutes to boot

I just upgraded from Mojave > Monterey. Although it does not take 25+ minutes to boot up, I would say it takes at least twice as long as it did with Mojave.

I'm booting into an internal 2 TB Fusion Drive on late 2015 iMac.

wired i have a late 2015 iMac 27 in , booting from a modified LaCie ssd enclosure with a 1 tb crucial ssd and it boot pretty close to the speed of my internal SSD drive which is the apple ssd drive. i haven't seen any of the slow downs these people are having, which makes me wonder how many are using 3rd party antivirus.

Same deal here on a 2017 iMac. Both Big Sur and Monterey suddenly threw the machine into looooonnggg start-up times. Once the 5-minute process is done, everything seems to be running somewhat okay.

Ah, nothing like progress to regress. Watching this thread...

I get a similar issue with an external ssd (but less extreme): my Macbook air takes ~10 min to boot, when it took only 30-40 sec with Big Sur (which was already longer than Catalina and Mojave)... quite frustrating, especially with external drive and dual boot as I have to reboot very often...

On Dec 7, I reported here that I had seen boot time to login screen go from about 45 sec to 4+ minutes.

But now, after 3 weeks of slow boot times, the machine has decided to revert to normal behavior: ~ 40 sec.

I didn't do anything to encourage this change in attitude, except threaten to put it through a couple of cycles in the dish washer.

@mrlinchen

Unfortunately not. Boot time even raised in my case from almost exactly 5 minutes (originally 30-40 seconds) now to 7 - 7:30 minutes.

Guess Apple wants all of us buying brand new MacBook Pros, iMacs and new too come iMac Pros ;-))

and therefore they implemented this delay in the boot process.

I am also experiencing the crazy lonnnnnng boot time on a late '15 iMac (from external SSD). Several of you have mentioned good boot speed from a Lacie enclosure. Are you allowed to post a link or a model number? I would like to see if it makes a difference. Thanks.

Thanks for the update about different enclosures. Think I'll wait though until there's an official statement from Apple on what is and what isn't compatible with MacOS Monterey. I've wasted enough time on it already.

Regardless of whether this issue is ever addressed, it’s a failure by Apple to either properly test MacOS before initial release or warn customers of incompatibilities. Some say it’s a cynical sales ploy to force customers to buy M1 Macs. Whatever the truth, MacOS Monterey obviously doesn’t work properly with some third party SSD drives and enclosures. At the very least we should have been warned about this prior to install.

Under the guise of efficiency & security, Apple seems to moving away from hardware customisation. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of that strategy. Bigger profits for Apple shareholders, but such machines will be thrown away and replaced more often which will generate a lot more computer waste. I wonder what percentage of customers actually recycle their Macs with Apple. Seems very outdated and not environmentally friendly, much better to have machines that can be upgraded with newer parts and last longer.

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.

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.

I finally tried to resolve this same issue yesterday, but with updating to Big Sur from Catalina on 2019 iMac w/ 1TB Fusion Drive, using macOS Recovery (Erase & Reinstall macOS Big Sur) and now my iMac won’t finish the installation. See link below.

Reinstall macOS Big Sur after Erase Mac H… - Apple Community