> I remember when they really did have sub-one-second boot
Wow, as someone who never owned a Chromebook, >1s boot times seem enviable, even if booting into Chrome is rather restrictive. What are boot times like nowadays?
For my windows systems, a majority of boot time seems to be in pre-boot environment (bios/uefi/whatever), once it hits the disk it's pretty fast. They're all ssds though, because Windows 10 on spinning disks seems intollerable.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft cheats the boot process, and it's a special hibernation restore, but either way, it's pretty fast. Chrome devices benefit from also having a much faster firmware than most, so even if Windows booted as fast as Chrome OS, the whole device would still be much slower to boot.
And then you have your corporate-mandated image where Windows is bogged down by a metric crapton of garbage enterprise software. My work notebook takes about a minute to come to a state where I can actually enter my username and password on the login screen. Once on the desktop, it takes about 8-10 minutes to get settled (i.e. CPU load goes to baseline).
The way to win in the corporate world is to push for whatever OS they least manage. At Yahoo, getting a mac meant less corpware on your desktop; at Facebook, you would be better off with Windows (or maybe Linux), cause IT is proficient at running random garbage on macos.
Wow, as someone who never owned a Chromebook, >1s boot times seem enviable, even if booting into Chrome is rather restrictive. What are boot times like nowadays?