Apple Silicon Macs are twice as reliable as their Intel predecessors, according to a study conducted by a British Mac refurbisher.

Hoxton Macs compared the hardware failure rates on the 120,000 refurbished machines it has sold since 2013, including both older Intel-based Macs and the newer Apple Silicon Macs that it’s been selling since the turn of the decade.

The company’s data shows that only 0.9% of the Apple Silicon Macs it sold in 2025 experienced a hardware failure within the first year. Matched for age, on a like-for-like basis, Intel-based Macs had a hardware failure rate of 2.2% in their first year.

“From the very start, we felt that they were more reliable,” said Ben Higgs, founder of Hoxton Macs, talking about Apple Silicon Macs. "We had to get a big enough sample size to take out the age bias, so now five or six years on we’ve got a really good sample size of 120,000 devices here, so that we can delve into the data and see exactly what the differences are.

“We found that they are significantly more reliable than the Intel devices, even when normalised for age of the device.”

Higgs said a major factor in the reliability of Apple Silicon Macs is that they produce much less heat than the older Intel machines. "One of the biggest issues the Intel devices had that we saw was repeated heat cycles causing components to fail," he said.

Higgs said the company first noticed a spike of heat-related problems in 2008, when heat from the graphics cards would cause solder joints to fail. That issue reoccured in 2011 and led to Apple facing a class-action lawsuit .

Less heat generated also means that the fans on Apple Silicon Macs (if they’re even fitted in the first place) do much less work than they did in the days of Intel processors. Higgs claims that fans were “quite a common failure point on the Intel devices—you’d open the back up and it’d be absolutely full of dust and debris where they’ve been constantly cycling over the years."

Now devices such as the MacBook Air aren’t even fitted with fans and those Macs that do still have them are spinning at a much reduced rate. “I can’t even think of a single fan failure we’ve had with an Apple Silicon device,” said Higgs.

The reduced power draw of the Apple Silicon Macs has another benefit: less punishment for the battery.

Apple Silicon lasts about twice as long on a charge than the Intel MacBooks, according to Hoxton Macs, meaning fewer battery cycles and better battery health. The company’s data shows a 4-5 year old Intel MacBook had an average of 227 battery cycles, where the battery is drained and fully recharged. By comparison, an Apple Silicon MacBook of a similar age had only 103 cycles.

“The main driver of battery lifespan is the number of charge cycles it receives,” said Higgs. “We find ourselves doing a lot less changing of batteries now, because they are a lot less utilised than they were with the Intel devices.”

That’s not to say Apple Silicon Macs are perfect when it comes to repairability. The system-on-a-chip nature of the design—where processor, memory and storage are all embedded on the same main board—means that if there’s a fault with one of those components “it’s very difficult to fix,” said Higgs. The latest MacBook Pro has a repairability rating of only 4 out 10 from iFixit , for example.

Since tighter right to repair legislation has been introduced, Apple has “made a little bit of an effort to make things a touch more repairable,” said Higgs, but it’s doubtless preferable for all involved if the device doesn’t fail as often in the first place.