• Apple has unveiled its M1 chip and the first computers that will run on it: a MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini.
• The company back in June first announced its intention to move away from Intel and use its own chips based on the same mobile architecture as the iPhone for future Macs.
• Apple isn't the first to design laptops based on mobile chip designs. But such laptops are usually meant for lightweight tasks, not heavy-duty computing tasks like video editing or coding.
• Apple made it clear this wasn't the case for its Mac chips, which it envisions as the future of its laptop and desktop line.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple laid out its vision for the future of computing on Tuesday with the introduction of the M1, its first Mac chip designed in-house, and the new devices it will power: a new version of the MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini.

We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. 5.3 Gaming, Gambling, and Lotteries. Gambling, gaming, and lotteries can be tricky to manage and tend to be one of the most regulated offerings on the App Store. Only include this functionality if you’ve fully vetted your legal obligations everywhere you make your app available and are prepared for extra time during the review process. The App Store is a safe and trusted place for customers to discover and download apps, and a great opportunity for developers. The App Store Review Guideline changes and clarifications support new features in upcoming OS releases, better protect customers, and help your apps go through the review process as smoothly as possible. Stay connected to your gaming friends and the games you love to play, wherever you go with PlayStation App. See who's online, voice chat and send messages, and discover deals on PS Store. Connect with friends. See who's online and what games they're playing. Multiple providers have developed interfaces for mobile use, including iPhone gambling apps. These applications support legal gambling entertainment like online casino, poker and sports betting programs, each of which having more specific subcategories like table games, live betting.

The shift allows Apple to break away from Intel and exercise more freedom over the design, development, and launch cycle of its Mac computers. With its own chips, Apple can finally bring the 'secret sauce' long since incorporated into the iPhone — homemade chips that allow it to fine-tune performance and features — to the Mac.

Apple Gaming Console

But it's also a major gamble. Apple isn't the first tech giant to release laptops with chips based on the Arm standard, the same basic architecture as those found in mobile devices. But Apple is taking a decidedly different approach.

Apple Gambling

Arm-based Windows PCs, like Microsoft's Surface Pro X, boast long battery life and lightweight designs but often fall short of their more traditional Intel-based brethren when it comes to the raw computing power necessary to do real work.

Apple has said the new devices running on its M1 chip are the best of all possible worlds: The new MacBook Air doesn't have any fans, promising to be the quietest MacBook yet, while the updated MacBook Pro is said to show big gains in battery life over the previous model. Even with all of that, Apple says the M1 chip gives these machines, including that new Mac Mini, better performance than its own Intel-based line or most Windows PCs.

If Apple is correct, then it points to an exciting future for the whole Mac lineup. But if these machines, and the chip that powers them, fall short of expectations, the future of Apple's computer business is at risk.

Windows has already been moving this direction

In recent years, tech companies like Lenovo, Microsoft, and Samsung have introduced laptops powered by chips that use the Arm architecture: a chip design licensed from the British company of the same name. Known for their balance of energy efficiency and processing power, Arm chips are best known for their role in the smartphone revolution, though they can more recently be found in everything from drones to data centers.

In laptops, those processors have helped Windows devices like Samsung's Galaxy Book S, Lenovo's Yoga 5G, and Microsoft's Surface Pro X offer ultrathin devices that are intended to bring the convenience of a phone or tablet together with the versatility of a more traditional laptop. In fact, all three of those devices offer cellular connectivity, and Microsoft's and Lenovo's do double duty as a full-fledged Windows 10-based tablet.

Still, the history of Windows on Arm is rocky: Microsoft launched an Arm-powered Surface tablet back in 2012 powered by a specially designed Windows RT operating system, based on Windows 8. That device, and Windows RT itself, were flops largely because of issues with app compatibility and performance. Most Windows apps were built for Intel processors; Windows RT couldn't run all of them, and even when it could they rarely ran as well.

No doubt, things have improved on that front. Microsoft has invested in the technology necessary to run most Intel-based apps on an Arm-based Windows machine, making them a much more reasonable proposition.

But it's also worth flagging The Verge's review of this year's Surface Pro X refresh, which praised Microsoft's app compatibility work and the design of the hardware but also flagged some headaches arising from the fact that it's not based on Intel.

Apple's big bet is that the M1 is as good or better than Intel's chips

Apple's M1 chips are based on the Arm architecture, just like those found in Windows PCs. That, however, is where the similarities largely end. The M1 was custom-designed by Apple based on a decade spent building highly acclaimed iPhone and iPad processors. Those processors are a big part of Apple's smartphone success.

That may be why Apple is so confident in declaring the M1 the future of the Mac, full-stop. Where the Windows PC industry is still exploring the possibilities of using Arm rather than Intel's x86 processor architecture, Apple says it hopes to have the Mac line entirely on its own chips within two years, starting with the devices announced Tuesday.

That's an important distinction, because it means it's banking that M1-powered Macs will be as good as or better than their Intel-based predecessors for video editing, photo processing, music creation, coding, or any other computing-heavy creative tasks. In fact, Apple's presentation showcased the potential for these new Macs to do all of those things.

By comparison, it would be hard to recommend an Arm-based Windows 10 PC for anything other than light web browsing, document editing, or Netflix.

The payoff for Apple could be huge

The decision to move away from Intel is a dramatic one, but it could pay off.

Without relying on Intel and its release schedule, Apple gets the flexibility to design updated processors alongside the Macs they will go on to power. That, in turn, means Apple can offer new features in the Mac that might not have been possible before.

For example, on Tuesday, Apple showcased how quickly an M1-powered Mac could wake from sleep, similarly to an iPhone. Macs can also benefit from Apple's image signal processor, used to make camera images crisper and cleaner on the iPhone. In fact, M1-based Macs can actually run iPhone and iPad apps, thanks to the similarity of the chips.

There are still lingering questions over how well the devices actually live up to Apple's lofty promises, and we may not get answers until the devices officially start shipping next week. For starters, it will be interesting to see how well older Mac apps run on the new silicon, especially in light of Windows' difficulties there.

After all, Apple's initial rollout of Catalyst, its program for enabling developers to port iPad apps over to the Mac, encountered some road bumps in its early days, as Bloomberg previously reported.

Still, the commitment to bring its new M1 chip to powerful computers like the MacBook Pro suggests Apple is confident it will work — and views this risk as being a necessary one for the Mac's future.

I personally don’t like to gamble. I don’t like slot machines or roulette. The decisions you make are too inconsequential.

Have you ever looked at the payout odds for roulette? No matter how you bet your percentage return is always the same. On average you’re going to lose 5 cents for every dollar you bet. It’s true that there are a lot of options in roulette. A lot of choices to make. But none of them have any impact on the game. You’re always going to lose about 5 cents for every dollar you bet.

Slot machines are the same. You can decide how much you want to bet and you can decide how many “lines” you want to bet but all your doing is deciding how quickly or slowly you lose your money. Even then, casinos tend to doctor the odds so that lower-cost slots have a worse payout in an attempt to even out the money-lost-per-hour of all slot machines.

So in slots, roulette, and other casino games it’s impossible to make a choice that impacts the game.

If you are a game author like me, shit like this makes you really curious. It’s hard to make a good video game, lots and lots of us have tried and failed. But here is a simple set of games where players literally make no decisions yet sit enraptured by them. The world wide gambling market is worth over 300 billion dollars while the videogame market is worth less than 70. Amazingly, the majority of that 300 billion dollars comes from people playing games where their decisions have no impact on the game.

But every pillar of game design that I respect is fundamentally rooted in player choice. So why the hell are all these people deciding to give money to casinos?

So far my only answer has been cash payouts. Yeah, slot machines are pretty simple skinner boxes. But even in a skinner box you need to give the pigeon something they care about. If you awarded the pigeon “points” for hitting a button then it would lose interest pretty fast. The cost of hitting the bar dwarfs the potential gain of the payout.

So it has been with slot machines. Downloadable slot machine games have been around for as long as games. They never really went anywhere because with no cash reward and no interesting choices the skinner box collapses. Until now. Ladies and gentlemen I would like to present to you, Slotomania:

Slotomania and, ridiculously, Slotomania HD are both on the iPad top grossing apps chart. That means people are dropping a lot of money into a slot machine with no payout. The skinner box has no clothes but it doesn’t seem to matter.

How did Slotomania manage to turn the Skinner Box back on? Well check out the bar at the top of that Screen shot. Can you guess what that is?

That’s an xp bar. You can level this slot machine. When you level you get access to more games (well, the same game reskinned) and you raise your minimum bet. You gain xp purely by spending credits. The more credits you gamble the more you level. Of course you run out of credits about two and a half games in so the only way to unlock more is by paying real money.

I also think they trade off the associations that casino gamblers already have with slot machines. By mimicking casino slots they can hijack the Pavlovian response people have already built up around traditional slots.

This is genius, evil, and Slotomania has been making money off of it on iPad and facebook for two years. They had been refining their strategy and becoming more and more profitable until, shock, last year Ceaser’s bought them and they really started to make money.

It’s these kind of brain hacks that make me really uncomfortable. Ceaser’s and Slotomania basically earn their money from failures in the human mind. They can compel us to play their shitty games and they can compel us to pay them money to do it. They don’t offer us a system to master or anything you might define as “fun” in return. They just reach into our brain and make us dance to their tune.

Gambling and slot machines have historically, and sensibly, been deemed bad for society and often made illegal. Why Apple has decided to let them loose on its walled garden is beyond me. They’re gambling that the government isn’t going to step in and try to put things in order. If they lose that bet then the laws will be broad and ham fisted and we’re all going to wish they’d just stayed the fuck out of the casino.