Month: November 2019

Changing game

Yesterday we reconnected Netflix after having gone off the platform for a month – we had thought we were wasting too much time on the platform, and so pulled the plug, until the paucity of quality non-sport content on our other streaming platforms forced us to return.

The first thing I did upon reconnecting Netflix was watching Gamechangers, a documentary about the benefits of vegan food, which had been recommended to me by a couple of business associates a few weeks back.

The documentary basically picks a bunch of research that talks about the benefits of plant-based food and staying away from animal-based food. The key idea is that animals are “just middlemen of protein”, and by eating plants we might be going straight to source.

And it is filled with examples of elite athletes and strong-persons who have turned vegan, and how going vegan is helping them build more stamina and have better health indicators, including the length and hardness of erections.

The documentary did end up making me feel uncomfortable – I grew up vegetarian, but for the last 7-8 years I’ve been eating pretty much everything. And I’ve come to a point of life where I’m not sure if I’ll get my required nutrient mix from plant-based foods only.

And there comes this documentary presenting evidence upon evidence that plant based foods are good, and you should avoid animal based food if you want your arteries to not be clogged, to keep your stamina high, and so on. There were points during the documentary where I seriously considered turning vegetarian once again.

Having given it a day, I think the basic point of the documentary as I see it is that, ceteris paribus, a plant based diet is likely to keep you healthier and fitter than an animal-based diet. But then, ceteris is not paribus.

The nutrient mix that you get from the sort of vegetarian diet that I grew up on is very different from the nutrient mix you get from a meat-based diet. Some of the examples of vegan diets shown in the documentary, for example, rely heavily on mock meats (made with soybean), which have a similar nutritional profile to meats they are meant to mock. And that is very different from the carb-fests that south indian vegetarian food have turned into.

So for me to get influenced by the documentary and turn back vegetarian (or even vegan, which I’d imagine will be very hard for me to do), I need to supplement my diet with seemingly unnatural foods such as “mock meat” if I need to get the same nutritional balance that I’ve gotten used to of late. Simply eliminating all meat or animal based products from my diet is not going to make me any more healthier, notwithstanding what the documentary states, or what Virat Kohli does.

In other words, it seems to me that getting the right balance of nutrients is a tradeoff between eating animal-based food, and eating highly processed unnatural food (mock meat). And I’m not willing to switch on that yet.

Why Mourinho failed at ManYoo

Yesterday, Baada and I decided to try and record one of our recent WhatsApp conversations and release it as a podcast. I was in charge of tech, and I messed up massively. I was using Skype, and for whatever reason, it appears that my phone picked the microphone input from the phone itself and not from the AirPods I was using, so my voice came very faintly. Baada’s voice came well, though.

Leading up to the podcast, both of us had done our homework, so it’s a pity that it didn’t come out well and we can’t release it. The topic of the podcast was what kind of strategy, tactics and formations Jose Mourinho will use at Spurs. As part of our preparation, we had looked at the formations that he had used in each of his previous six clubs (Porto, Chelsea (1), Inter, Real Madrid, Chelsea (2) and Manchester United). There was one clear trend.

There are a number of positions that Mourinho prefers, and we were able to identify players in his first five clubs who occupied that position. And when it came to ManYoo, we drew a blank. This happened repeatedly as we talked through his possible formations and possible personnel to use at Spurs.

For example, Mourinho has a history of playing a Number Ten, and giving him a largely free role, encouraging him to get forward and score. Deco at Porto, Lampard at Chelsea 1, Sneijder at Inter, Ozil at Madrid, Hazard at Chelsea 2. And nobody at ManYoo! Through the Mourinho years, ManYoo didn’t have a proper Number Ten (and they don’t have one now) – it’s almost like a Number Ten wasn’t part of the ManYoo school of playing.

Then, people like to talk about Mourinho parking the bus, but an interesting feature of his game is that he uses a defensive midfielder who is good on the ball. Costinha at Porto. Makelele at Chelsea (he’s not that ultra-defensive midfielder commentators make him out to be – read Michael Cox’s Mixer to know more about him). Motta, Cambiasso and Zanetti at Inter. Xabi Alonso at Madrid. Nemanja Matic at Chelsea the second time round.

And again ManYoo didn’t have a comparable player. Mourinho took Matic along, but he didn’t do particularly well there (maybe he was past his prime?).

Then Mourinho likes a box-to-box midfielder who doesn’t mind doing dirty work. Essien in Chelsea 1, Khedira at Real. Ramires in Chelsea 2. Again ManYoo lacked such a player by the time Mourinho arrived (had he taken over earlier, maybe he might have used Paul Scholes in the role).

You can go on.

The remarkable thing is that Spurs actually have good personnel for most of the roles that Mourinho likes. They have an excellent Number Nine in Harry Kane. Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen and Hyong-Min Son are all capable of being the Number Ten (Alli is most likely to play there). Moussa Sissoko will be the box-to-box hardworking midfielder. Harry Winks can actually play the ball from central midfield. And so on.

So I expect Mourinho to do better with Spurs than he did with Manyoo. Even if he doesn’t have the budget to buy players of his choice in the next window.

Spurs right to sack Pochettino?

A few months back, I built my “football club elo by manager” visualisation. Essentially, we take the week-by-week Premier League Elo ratings from ClubElo and overlay it with managerial tenures.

A clear pattern emerges – a lot of Premier League sackings have been consistent with clubs going down significantly in terms of Elo Ratings. For example, we have seen that Liverpool sacked Rafa Benitez, Kenny Dalglish (in 2012) and Brendan Rodgers all at the right time, and that similarly Manchester United sacked Jose Mourinho when he brought them back to below where he started.

And now the news comes in that Spurs have joined the party, sacking long-time coach Mauricio Pochettino. What I find interesting is the timing of the sacking – while international breaks are usually a popular time to change managers (the two week gap in fixtures gives a club some time to adjust), most sackings happen in the first week of the international break.

The Pochettino sacking is surprising in that it has come towards the end of the international break, giving the club four days before their next fixture (a derby at the struggling West Ham). However, the Guardian reports that Spurs are close to hiring Jose Mourinho, and that might explain the timing of the sacking.

So were Spurs right in sacking Pochettino, barely six months after he took them to a Champions League final? Let’s look at the Spurs story under Pochettino using Elo ratings. 

 

 

 

 

Pochettino took over in 2014 after an underwhelming 2013-14 when the club struggled under Andre Villas Boas and then Tim Sherwood. Initially, results weren’t too promising, as he took them from a 1800 rating down to 1700.

However, chairman Daniel Levy’s patience paid off, and the club mounted a serious challenge to Leicester in the 2015-16 season before falling away towards the end of the season, finishing third behind Arsenal. As the Elo shows, the improvement continued, as the club remained in Champions League places through the course of Pochettino’s reign.

Personally, the “highlight” of Pochettino’s reign was Spurs’ 4-1 demolition of Liverpool at Wembley in October 2017, a game I happened to watch at the stadium. And as per the Elo ratings the club plateaued shortly after that.

If that plateau had continued,  I suppose Pochettino would have remained in his job, giving the team regular Champions League football. This season, however, has been a disaster.

Spurs are 13 points below what they had scored in comparable fixtures last season, and unlikely to finish in the top six even. Their Elo has also dropped below 1850 for the first time since 2016-17. While that is still higher than where Pochettino started off at, the precipitous drop in recent times has meant that the club has possibly taken the right call in sacking Pochettino.

If Mourinho does replace him (it looks likely, as per the Guardian), it will present a personal problem for me – for over a decade now, Tottenham have been my “second team” in the top half of the Premier League, behind Liverpool. That cannot continue if Mourinho takes over. I’m wondering who to shift my allegiance to – it will have to be either Leicester or (horror of horrors) Chelsea!

Alchemy

Over the last 4-5 days I kinda immersed myself in finishing Rory Sutherland’s excellent book Alchemy.

It all started with a podcast, with Sutherland being the guest on Russ Roberts’ EconTalk last week. I’d barely listened to half the podcast when I knew that I wanted more of Sutherland, and so immediately bought the book on Kindle. The same evening, I finished my previous book and started reading this.

Sometimes I get a bit concerned that I’m agreeing with an author too much. What made this book “interesting” is that Sutherland is an ad-man and a marketer, and keeps talking down on data and economics, and plays up intuition and “feeling”. In other words, at least as far as professional career and leanings go, he is possibly as far from me as it gets. Yet, I found myself silently nodding in agreement as I went through the book.

If I have to summarise the book in one line I would say, “most decisions are made intuitively or based on feeling. Data and logic are mainly used to rationalise decisions rather than making them”.

And if you think about it, it’s mostly true. For example, you don’t use physics to calculate how much to press down on your car accelerator while driving – you do it essentially by trial and error and using your intuition to gauge the feedback. Similarly, a ball player doesn’t need to know any kinematics or projectile motion to know how to throw or hit or catch a ball.

The other thing that Sutherland repeatedly alludes to is that we tend to try and optimise things that are easy to measure or optimise. Financials are a good example of that. This decade, with the “big data revolution” being followed by the rise of “data science”, the amount of data available to make decisions has been endless, meaning that more and more decisions are being made using data.

The trouble, of course, is availability bias, or what I call as the “keys-under-lamppost bias”. We tend to optimise and make decisions on things that are easily measurable (this set of course is now much larger than it was a decade ago), and now that we know we are making use of more objective stuff, we have irrational confidence in our decisions.

Sutherland talks about barbell strategies, ergodicity, why big data leads to bullshit, why it is important to look for solutions beyond the scope of the immediate domain and the Dunning-Kruger effect. He makes statements such as “I would rather run a business with no mathematicians than with second-rate mathematicians“, which exactly mirrors my opinion of the “data science industry”.

There is absolutely no doubt why I liked the book.

Thinking again, while I said that professionally Sutherland seems as far from me as possible, it’s possibly not so true. While I do use a fair bit of data and economic analysis as part of my consulting work, I find that I make most of my decisions finally on intuition. Data is there to guide me, but the decision-making is always an intuitive process.

In late 2017, when I briefly worked in an ill-fated job in “data science”, I’d made a document about the benefits of combining data analysis with human insight. And if I think about my work, my least favourite work is where I’ve done work with data to help clients make “logical decision” (as Sutherland puts it).

The work I’ve enjoyed the most has been where I’ve used the data and presented it in ways in which my clients and I have noticed patterns, rationalised them and then taken a (intuitive) leap of faith into what the right course of action may be.

And this also means that over time I’ve been moving away from work that involves building models (the output is too “precise” to interest me), and take on more “strategic” stuff where there is a fair amount of intuition riding on top of the data.

Back to the book, I’m so impressed with it that in case I was still living in London, I would have pestered Sutherland to meet me, and then tried to convince him to let me work for him. Even if at the top level it seems like his work and mine are diametrically opposite..

I leave you with my highlights and notes from the book, and this tweet.

Here’s my book, in case you are interested.

 

EPL: Mid-Season Review

Going into the November international break, Liverpool are eight points ahead at the top of the Premier League. Defending champions Manchester City have slipped to fourth place following their loss to Liverpool. The question most commentators are asking is if Liverpool can hold on to this lead.

We are two-thirds of the way through the first round robin of the premier league. The thing with evaluating league standings midway through the round robin is that it doesn’t account for the fixture list. For example, Liverpool have finished playing the rest of the “big six” (or seven, if you include Leicester), but Manchester City have many games to go among the top teams.

So my practice over the years has been to compare team performance to corresponding fixtures in the previous season, and to look at the points difference. Then, assuming the rest of the season goes just like last year, we can project who is likely to end up where.

Now, relegation and promotion introduces a source of complication, but we can “solve” that by replacing last season’s relegated teams with this season’s promoted teams (18th by Championship winners, 19th by Championship runners-up, and 20th by Championship playoff winners).

It’s not the first time I’m doing this analysis. I’d done it once in 2013-14, and once in 2014-15. You will notice that the graphs look similar as well – that’s how lazy I am.

Anyways, this is the points differential thus far compared to corresponding fixtures of last season. 

 

 

 

Leicester are the most improved team from last season, having scored 8 points more than in corresponding fixtures from last season. Sheffield United, albeit starting from a low base, have done extremely well as well. And last season’s runners-up Liverpool are on a plus 6.

The team that has done worst relative to last season is Tottenham Hotspur, at minus 13. Key players entering the final years of their contract and not signing extensions, and scanty recruitment over the last 2-3 years, haven’t helped. And then there is Manchester City at minus 9!

So assuming the rest of the season’s fixtures go according to last season’s corresponding fixtures, what will the final table look  like at the end of the season?
We see that if Liverpool replicate their results from last season for the rest of the fixtures, they should win the league comfortably.

What is more interesting is the gaps between 1-2, 2-3 and 3-4. Each of the top three positions is likely to be decided “comfortably”, with a fairly congested mid-table.

As mentioned earlier, this kind of analysis is unfair to the promoted teams. It is highly unlikely that Sheffield will get relegated based on the start they’ve had.

We’ll repeat this analysis after a couple of months to see where the league stands!

Anuroop

Anuroop and I first met when we were three and a half years old. It was way too early in life to know what our first meeting was like, but I do remember that we used to play together in school. Back then, “playing” mostly consisted of running around the residential building that our school used for one section of kindergarten.

However, I think his leadership skills were on display rather early, as I clearly remember another classmate asking when we were five or six whether I was “part of Bunty gang or Anuroop gang”. I don’t remember which gang I was part of then, but over the years, Bunty and Anuroop ended up in the same gang, as other poles emerged in class to take the other side.

Some sort of leadership skill was also evident in fifth or sixth standard, when Bunty and Anuroop decided to run away from school, literally. I can’t comment too much about this incident since I myself had bunked school that day, but I heard that they stepped out during lunch break on the pretext of fetching a stray ball, and ended up walking all the way to Bannerghatta. And then, the story goes (I don’t have first hand information on this) that they started feeling hungry and decided to walk back to their respective homes.

I will leave out talking about what formed a rather large part of Anuroop’s life in our latter years together in school, and his college years. I’m skipping talking about this because I think it’s impolite to talk about that on a day when he is getting married – so I will let you infer what kind of episodes I’m leaving out of this essay. However, you can get in touch with me off the record, and I think these episodes are worth a “three beer conversation”. Among other things, it involves the usage of dictionaries and phone caller IDs (which was a big thing in the days of landlines).

Ninth or tenth standard was around the time when Anuroop and KK and I formed a “club” called NBA (Nammoora Basketball Aatagaararu). We would all get to school early in the morning (two hours before it opened), and spend our time playing half-court basketball. Ninth standard was also the time when I remember having some fight with Anuroop that started trivially, but ended with me getting really physically aggressive. I take this opportunity t0 (highly belatedly) apologise to him for that.

Anuroop had always been good at drawing. And he took it to another level in ninth standard when he started drawing cartoons. I clearly remember his first ever political cartoon – it showed the then Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda sitting on a donkey, and (the then Congress President) Sitaram Kesri lighting the donkey’s tail on fire. I really don’t know if he has preserved that drawing. It’s a classic, let me assure you.

His cartooning went to another level when he was in college, as he won inter-college competitions left, right and centre. I remember this fest at PESIT (in 2001, I think), where he was pissed off because he had won the cartooning contest and got “only” ?150. I had come second in the (much better funded) programming contest and won ?2500 or something.

After college, Anuroop gave up on cartooning and took up wildlife photography. This was possibly a consequence of his passion for wildlife that had started from an early age (in ninth standard, he had gotten into a major fight with another classmate after the latter killed a leech). Trust me, his pictures are absolutely brilliant.

Somewhere in between, I remember asking him if he will stick to photographing wild animals, or if he would take on more lucrative professions such as wedding photography. “I’d rather take pictures of monkeys than humans”, he had declared, before getting into people photography anyway. And he has done a spectacular job of that as well (OK this instagram account is private, because it has pictures of children, I guess).

I’ve known him for over 33 years now, so however much I write, there will always be something or the other I would have left out. I will end with a couple of anecdotes. Ok the first is not really an anecdote – in his school days, Anuroop was an incredibly early sleeper. If you called his house any time after 9, you could at best expect one of his parents to pick and inform you that “puTTu” had gone to bed. Soon we had all learned better to finish our business with him earlier in the evening.

The other story comes from our 10th standard pre-board preparatory exam, when we had copied from each other liberally (thus defeating the purpose of these pre-boards). I remember there was this one question on “habit forming substances” and their ill effects. Anuroop thought it was a bright idea to copy from KK, and asked him what the answer to this question was. KK put a thumb to his lips, indicating drink, specifically alcohol.

However, alcohol is something very foreign to Anuroop (I don’t think he has ever consumed it), so he decided to interpret it as water. And he wrote a 1000 word essay on “habitat forming substances” and on water conservation and all such. He’s always been goofy like that.

He is getting married today, to Chetna. I wish I could have been there in Jalandhar for their wedding, but a combination of circumstances means I wasn’t able to travel. I wish them all the best, and a happy married life. In any case, I’m not missing their wedding completely. They have another “leg” in Bangalore next weekend, and I’ll surely be there for that.

And maybe Chetna will buy me those three beers sometime, even if it’s a habit forming substance.

Lullabies and walled gardens

There’s still a bit of walled gardens going on in the device and voice control space. About two years ago, in London, we acquired an Amazon Echo, and found that Alexa voice assistant could be used to play songs through either Spotify or Amazon Music, but not through Apple Music, which we then used.

And so, we got rid of Apple Music and took a subscription to Spotify. And among the things we would make Alexa do was to play the daughter’s lullabies on Spotify. And that is how, at the age of two, Berry spoke her first complete sentence, “Alexa, use Spotify to play Iron Man by Black Sabbath”.

We don’t have that Echo any more, and as a household are in a complete “apple ecosystem” as far as devices are concerned. Two Macs, two iPhones, an iPad and now a pair of AirPods. However, we had quite got used to Spotify and its playlists and its machine learning, and even though the India catalogue is nowhere as good as the one in the UK, we continued our subscription.

However, bands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden are critical for us, not least because their songs are part of the daughter’s sleeping portfolio. So we need something other than Spotify. And then we discovered that in India, Amazon Prime Music comes bundled with the Amazon Prime membership. And so we created the daughter’s sleeping playlist there, and started using it for bands not available on Spotify.

It was an uncomfortable arrangement, not least because Amazon Music is a terrible software product. Since family subscriptions are still not a thing with Spotify India, during periods of deep work the wife and I would fight over who would get Spotify and who had to make do with Amazon Music.

And then there is voice. Being in a complete Apple EcoSystem now, we found that Siri couldn’t control Spotify or Amazon Music, and for seamless voice experience (especially given I use it in car, using Apple Carplay) we needed Apple Music. And given how painful Amazon Music is to use, I thought spending ?149 a month on Apple Music Family Subscription is worth it, and took the subscription yesterday.

Since then I’ve been happily using it using voice control on all devices. Except until an hour back when I was putting the daughter to sleep. She requested for “baby has he”, which is her way of saying she wants Iron Man by Rockabye Baby (rather than by Black Sabbath). And so I held down the home button of the iPad and barked “play lullaby renditions of Black Sabbath”.

I don’t know what Siri interpreted (this is a standard command I’d been giving it back in the day when I used to exclusively use Apple Music), but rather than playing Lullaby Renditions of Black Sabbath, it played some “holy lullabies”, basically lullaby versions of some Christian songs. I tried changing but the daughter insisted that I let it be.

And so she kept twisting and turning in her bed, not going to sleep. I soon lost patience. Abandoning voice, I opened the iPad and switched from Apple Music to Spotify, where I knew the Rockabye Baby album was open (from last night – we hardly use the iPad otherwise nowadays), and started playing that.

Before Iron Man was halfway through, the daughter was fast asleep.

Yet another “big data whisky”

A long time back I had used a primitive version of my Single Malt recommendation app to determine that I’d like Ardbeg. Presently, the wife was travelling to India from abroad, and she got me a bottle. We loved it.

And so I had screenshots from my app stored on my phone all the time, to be used while at duty frees, so I would know what whiskies to buy.

And then about a year back, we started planning a visit to Scotland. If you remember, we were living in London then, and my wife’s cousin and her family were going to visit us over Christmas. And the plan was to go to the Scottish Highlands for a few days. And that had to include a distillery tour.

Out came my app again, to determine which distillery to visit. I had made a scatter plot (which I have unfortunately lost since) with the distance from Inverness (where we were going to be based) on one axis, and the likelihood of my wife and I liking a whisky (based on my app) on the other (by this time, Ardbeg was firmly in the “calibration set”).

The clear winner was Clynelish – it was barely 100 kilometers away from Inverness, promised a nice drive there, and had a very high similarity score to the stuff that we liked. I presently called them to make a booking for a distillery tour. The only problem was that it’s a Diageo distillery, and Diageo distillery doesn’t allow kids inside (we were travelling with three of them).

I was proud of having planned my vacation “using data science”. I had made up a blog post in my head that I was going to write after the vacation. I was basically picturing “turning around to the umpire and shouting ‘howzzat'”. And then my hopes were dashed.

A week after I had made the booking, I got a call back from the distillery informing me that it was unfortunately going to be closed during our vacation, and so we couldn’t visit. My heart sank. We finally had to make do with two distilleries that were pretty close to Inverness, but which didn’t rate highly according to my app.

My cousin-in-law-in-law and I first visited Glen Ord, another Diageo distillery, leaving our wives and kids back in the hotel. The tour was nice, but the whisky at the distillery was rather underwhelming. The high point was the fact that Glen Ord also supplies highly peated malt to other Diageo distilleries such as Clynelish (which we couldn’t visit) and Talisker (one of my early favourites).

A day later, we went to the more family friendly Tomatin distillery, to the south of Inverness (so we could carry my daughter along for the tour. She seemed to enjoy it. The other kids were asleep in the car with their dad). The tour seemed better there, but their flagship whisky seemed flat. And then came Cu Bocan, a highly peated whisky that they produce in very limited quantities and distribute in a limited fashion.

Initially we didn’t feel anything, but then the “smoke hit from the back”. Basically the initial taste of the whisky was smooth, but as you swallowed it, the peat would hit you. It was incredibly surreal stuff. We sat at the distillery’s bar for a while downing glasses full of Cu Bocan.

The cousin-in-law-in-law quickly bought a bottle to take back to Singapore. We dithered, reasoning we could “use Amazon to deliver it to our home in London”. The muhurta for the latter never arrived, and a few months later we were on our way to India. Travelling with six suitcases and six handbags and a kid meant that we were never going to buy duty free stuff on our way home (not that Cu Bocan was available in duty free).

In any case, Clynelish is also not widely available in duty free shops, so we couldn’t have that as well for a long time. And then we found an incredibly well stocked duty free shop in Maldives, on our way back from our vacation there in August. A bottle was duly bought.

And today the auspicious event arrived for the bottle to be opened. And it’s spectacular. A very different kind of peat than Lagavulin (a bottle of which we just finished yesterday). This one hits the mouth from both the front and the back.

And I would like to call Clynelish the “new big data whisky”, having discovered it through my app, almost going there for a distillery tour, and finally tasting it a year later.

Highly recommended! And I’d highly recommend my app as well!

Cheers!

Arzoos

Founders, once they have a successful exit, tend to treat themselves as Gods.

Investors bow to them, and possibly recruit them into their investment teams. Startups flock to them, in the hope that they might use their recently gained wealth to invest in these companies. Having produced one successful exit, people assume that these people have “cracked the startup game”.

And so even if they have started humbly after their exit, all this adulation, and the perceived to potentially make or break a company by pulling out their chequebooks, goes to their head and the successful exit founders start treating themselves as Gods. And they believe that their one successful exit, which might have come for whatever reason (including a healthy dose of luck), makes them an authority to speak on pretty much any topic under the sun.

Now, I’m not grudging their money. There would have been something in the companies that they built, including timing or luck, even, that makes these people deserving of all the money they’ve made. What irritates me is their attitude of “knowing the mantra to be successful”, which allows them to comment on pretty much any issue or company, thinking people will take them seriously.

Recently I’ve come up with a word to represent all these one-time-successful founders who then flounder while dispensing advice – “Arzoos”.

The name of course alludes to Arzoo.com, which Sabeer Bhatia started after selling Hotmail to Microsoft. He had made a massive exit, and was one of the poster children of the dotcom boom (before the bust), especially in his native India. Except that the next company he started (Arzoo) sank without a trace to the extent that nobody even knows (or remembers) what the company did.

There is a huge dose of luck involved in making a small company successful, and that someone had a good exit doesn’t necessarily mean that they are great businessmen. As a corollary, that someone’s startup failed doesn’t make them bad businessmen.

Then again, it is part of human nature that we attribute all our successes to skill, and all our failures to bad luck!

 

iPhone

For a long time I eschewed iPhones. The form factor didn’t appeal to me. They were too fat for their size. And so I went with a series of Androids that started slowing down insanely after one OS update. And then the iPhone 6 changed that.

This had a remarkably different form factor to its predecessors. It was thin. It was big (not even the Max version). I saw some relatives using it at a family function and knew that it was the right time to try an iPhone. I bought an iPhone 6S, and still continue to use it, and have no problems with it at all.

My wife had bought an iPhone 6S at the same time as me, and that was doing well as well, until a freak accident a couple of months back. That meant she needed a new phone, and having never used an Android (she jumped “directly” from a cheap Nokia to iPhone 4), decided to get an iPhone.

The iPhone 11 arrived on Friday, brought to us by the sister-in-law. It’s big. Much bigger than my 6S. It has many cameras, and very evidently there is a significant amount of software processing that goes into shooting each photo.

And the photos are brilliant. Through the long weekend (Friday was a state holiday) we were at a wedding, and I kept borrowing this phone from my wife to take pictures (even the sister-in-law, who uses its predecessor XR, kept borrowing the 11 to take pictures)  – often enough to annoy the wife.

But I don’t know what it is with this iPhone, but it seems to “look like an Android”. Maybe it’s the case that we got in a hurry (cheapest on on Amazon). Maybe it’s that we haven’t yet removed the film covering the front. Maybe it’s the size. Maybe it’s the Wi-Fi indicator on the top right rather than top left. But for now I’m yet to “accept” it as an iPhone.

As things stand now, I intend to continue with my 6S for as long as it goes. Hopefully this won’t have a freak accident like my wife’s 6S.

PS: I also treated myself to a pair of AirPods. So far they’re decent, but I find them less effective in shutting off outside noise than some random earphones I used earlier. Maybe they aren’t optimised for my ear?

But I love the technology, though! And the product design.