Comment by everybodyknows

Two mobile devices I worked on, at different companies, ended up with fake progress bars for boot-up. We engineers wanted individual bar segments for kernel load, filesystem mount, daemon startup and so on -- but wiring up the necessary instrumentation to the GUI would have been significant work, and management wasn't going to allow anything less than a show-stopper bug to delay code freeze.

So in the real world, time-to-market beats UI truthfulness.