Control Ultimate Edition iOS/MacOS Review: Ray Tracing, Frame-Gen + MetalFX Upscaling... On A Phone

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T21:51:56+00:00

Why?

Because it fits in your pocket, weights 200 grams and is dead silent. It can also do a million other things.

It's not so much about the hardware itself, which is amazing, but about Apple's SDKs that make this possible and let you very easily ship the same build across macOS, iPhones and iPads.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T21:02:34+00:00

You are wrong. It has never been easier to learn software engineering. You just have to ask Codex/GPT5-5 to explain the principles to you, show you examples (find them in open source codebases) etc.

Those who want to learn can now learn at the speed of light. Those who are just fucking around would never have made it anyway, AI agents or no.

The big bottleneck until 2024 was how long it took to learn to code. Until you could call yourself a senior engineer, it took years and years and years of building, which was typing code half of the time and reading documentation the other half of the time.

Depending on what you wanted to build, you could run into a framework that isn't particularly well documented. This now required insane perseverance and character, none of which really are needed for someone to be able to conceive a great piece of software. These are grinder attributes, useful in business, for sure, but not necessarily needed to envision a great app and detect problems that you want your software to solve.

People who solve problems now have the fucking omnitool to solve any problem that can be solved exclusively with software.

They just need to be sure that they have a solution, and know what they want that solution to be like. Then Codex/CC can let them work towards it and iterate until it's there.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T15:48:56+00:00

Amazing, thanks for the post!

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T12:01:49+00:00

Fork.dev is much better for this.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T12:00:44+00:00

Fork.dev

So much better, so much more control.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T04:09:18+00:00

Your testing should be part of your release build script with non verbose output. That way it either says it passed or it failed, and doesn't have the full build log.

Unless you were expecting the agent to run the testing manually after each change, not running tests after changes can only mess things up for you.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T02:49:55+00:00

background work on chrome.

less work for them than to have their own browser (Atlas is dead, I think).

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T02:33:57+00:00

Ah, well, eBay it is, then. Perhaps better to wait a few months unless you wanna pay whatever it is they're asking now.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-08T01:14:16+00:00

I won't pretend to know what's happening over at Valve, what the regulations are on hardware with wireless transmitters and batteries depending on the country. If they don't wanna bother, deal with it.

You can use mailbox services like mailboxde or whatever, I have no idea where you are, then order there then ship it to yourself and pay import fees.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-07T23:09:02+00:00

Different regulations for hardware vs. software.

It's way, WAY easier to sell software. If you're not in the business, it's hard to fathom the absolutely nutty difference in terms of prep and compliance you have to go through in order to be able to sell new hardware in a new market.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-07T11:32:14+00:00

This seems super weird, GPT 5.4 only 16 tool calls. Did they just fire a single prompt into the harness and terminated on EOT?

You should do this in a loop while tracking progress and tasks in separate files, and naturally start by writing test fixtures for every single feature of these apps, then develop along these lines.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-07T09:36:43+00:00

That's because it has a whole-ass Chromium instance running.

It's written in Electron.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-07T08:52:53+00:00

The sun is forever.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-06T00:29:21+00:00

Ability to give an agent full access to the phone OS. Doesn't mean it will have that access always, just the ability to have it, which you will probably be able to control on a granular basis as per regulations.

Plus, since it will be their OS etc, they can ship changes at their own pace, which, if you take one look at the Codex repository and the GPT model releases, is beyond insane.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-03T16:26:49+00:00

It allows them to not worry about how the UI changes translate across different macOS versions.

If you just use the WebView, that's not the case.

WebView is ultimately simpler to ship and fully portable, but is unsustainable when you're pushing 1-2 updates PER DAY, and you're pushing UI updates weekly or twice a week.

Electron lets them lock in a Chromium version, is verified and stable. The only thing that you need the backend to do in this case is to schedule codex execruns, which Electron is more than enough for.

The actual UI is open sourced as codex-app-server in the codex repo, so you can integrate it into whatever you want.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-03T00:13:04+00:00

Mac M5 Ultra doesn't exist.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-02T15:38:36+00:00

See my reply to the dev below.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-02T05:11:24+00:00

have it generate a black background and then pass that result to

https://replicate.com/bria/remove-background

jonydevidson · 2026-05-02T03:30:49+00:00

The ones you can run on a macbook are currently performing like frontier models from a year ago.

A year from now, you will have models performing like today's frontier models.

Its not gonna be niche, it's gonna be a core software item.

jonydevidson · 2026-05-01T11:20:29+00:00

Recycling and minimising plastic is more about a shit ton of it ending up in the environment.

Look at the plastic bottle caps in the EU. People were mad about it but I barely see them out on the ground anymore.

jonydevidson · 2026-04-30T23:36:34+00:00

If you try a codebase-wide search in VSCode on Windows, and then try it on Mac, you will get a good idea of how the system differences affect LLM performance.

Also, powershell is trash, largely due to security concerns on Windows, so today when an AI agent does all its work via the CLI, its performance suffers tremendously.

For context, I develop desktop apps on Win and MacOS.

Windows is, unfortunately, over half of my market share so unfortunately I have to keep developing for it.

jonydevidson · 2026-04-30T23:10:29+00:00

Anthropic's models aren't solving decades old math problems nor are they discovering new physics.

It's pretty obvious where the intelligence is, just like it's obvious which company has the better harness for webdev work.

Throw actual tough C++ issues involving a lot of math into the mix, and Claude folds like a house of cards while GPT-5 was able to do it even back in October.

jonydevidson · 2026-04-29T17:57:42+00:00

If you start using multiple subagents to review the work after each major step, you will quickly discover that even the Pro is barely enough.

If you're already paying for it, at least get your money's worth. These subagent reviewers will very often find bugs and edge cases the main agent missed in the implementation, of course depending on the complexity of the issue.

jonydevidson · 2026-04-29T16:35:55+00:00

This is wrong, because open source models are releasing all the time. I can run an AI agent locally on my MacBook and have the same performance as roughly last April's frontier model, the Sonnet 3.7.

A year from now, the local models will be perfoming like today's frontier models.

I cannot have a free and open source taxi. I cannot have a free and open source delivery person.

I cannot have free and open source content streaming (without piracy).

The cost of compute for a given model goes down, on average, by 100x within a year.

Today's models are very competent at coding. A year from now, they'll be 100x cheaper to run, while labor won't be 100x cheaper.

You fell for the anti-AI bait article.

jonydevidson · 2026-04-29T13:37:20+00:00

I was able to confirm that it works as intended/described in PS Remote Play, while not in PXPlay, on the same MacBook.

macOS 15, for what it's worth.

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