A recent Xbox update quietly made Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S consoles boot a bit faster, at least for Xbox Insiders.
As The Verge spotted, several Xbox engineers have confirmed the update. Engineering lead Eden Marie highlighted the change on Saturday, noting that "the boot animation and cold startup time in general on Xbox Series X|S consoles has been shortened in the latest Insider builds."
Xbox integrated marketing director Josh Munsee followed up to confirm that a shorter bootup animation was made for the consoles, matching the "overall startup time" which has been cut from around nine seconds to four seconds.
Senior product manager lead Jake Rosenberg also pointed out that Xbox One consoles benefited from this update as well. "Not only is the animation shorter, but Xbox One generation consoles are booting noticeably faster with these changes," he added.
To clarify, it's not that the startup animation was holding the consoles back. Engineers were able to speed up the boot process and a new, shorter animation was then made to fit the reduced time frame. Your console isn't booting more slowly because of a mandatory animation, and if skipping animations could speed things up, JRPGs would break the sound barrier.
This update seems to be limited to Xbox Insiders for the time being, but as with all Insider patches, it should eventually roll out to the general Xbox player base. It's not a massive time save, but it does cut the startup time for new-gen Xbox consoles by over 50%, which is pretty significant when viewed through the utterly perverse lens of statistics. Besides, five seconds can feel much longer when you really, really want to play a particular game as soon as possible.
Also rolling out to Xbox Insiders: long-awaited Discord voice chat on Xbox.
