Apple Silicon Cuts Mac Failures In Half, Says Refurb Firm

InnovationConsumer TechApple Silicon Cuts Mac Failures In Half, Says Refurb FirmByBarry Collins,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Barry Collins is a tech journalist writing about PCs, Macs and games.Follow AuthorJun 09, 2026, 05:56am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.MacBook failures have significantly reduced in recent years Future Publishing via Getty ImagesApple 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.”Feeling The HeatHiggs 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. MORE FOR YOUHiggs said the company first noticed a spike of heat-related problems in 2008, when heat from...