Today’s blog is aimed largely at my staff, but it could apply to anybody who reads this blog.  It is about asking you what you have learnt working at the company where you work right now?  Not so much about, for example in my firm’s case, what you might have learnt about the law and Road Accident Fund cases, but what you have learnt about business, how to run a business and the insight you have obtained?  

We can all experience the same thing, we can all be part of the same system – and I am not just talking about work now – but just as the witnesses to a crime, we all tend to see and learn different things and I would be very interested in your perspective. 

I was interested to read some of the reviews of the iPhone 8.  It went on sale for the first time on Friday, 22 September and of course differs from the iPhone X, which is the brand new one with the OLED screen, and which only comes out in November.  

What I enjoyed reading about in terms of the iPhone 8, it is how this phone compares to other phones from other companies.  The iPhone 8 is of course not going to be as fast as the iPhone X, but the iPhone 8 has a core processor score that is 25% faster than the iPhone 7 and 80% faster than the iPhone 6.  The very fastest Android phones are much slower.  In fact, Samsung’s main phone, the Galaxy S8 is not only half the speed of the iPhone 8, but it is actually still slower than last year’s iPhone 7 and the iPhone 6S which was released in 2015.  Some of the comparisons I read went on to say that basically the closest rivals for the Apple iPhones, in terms of pure power and speed, are in fact computers – and not other phones.

The explanation for this was quite interesting to read and that is Apple designed its own processors.  The competing phone companies do not design their own processors and they rely on chips that are created by other companies.  Everything that you do on the phone relates to the chip and the better the chip is, the better it works.  Chips that are specifically designed, as iPhones are, by the company for the phone will function much better than simply buying somebody else’s chip and then putting it into your own phone.  

In short, you can love another phone for all the reasons you want, you can say that you prefer it for this or that reason, but you cannot possibly ever say that it is more powerful and faster than an Apple iPhone, because it is not.  They have the fastest, most powerful phones that allow them to produce benchmark scores far higher than their competition.  At sites like Geekbench you can compare the processors, the scores that they achieve and be able to tell, for example if the iPhone X is going to be almost 6 times more powerful than the iPhone 5.  That is if we are going on single-core performance, but once you start looking at multi-core performance, it would be about 9 times more powerful.

Some of my friends are taking bets that KPMG in South Africa will be out of business by the end of this year.  That is probably a fairly wild prediction, but at the moment they have executive staff resigning and are losing clients.  Obviously, all of this is about the work they did for the Gupta’s and we have already seen what happened to the UK public relations firm, Bell Pottinger.  Meanwhile, Pravin Gordhan has warned that more, with regard to KPMG is going to come out.  The report by KPMG led to the dismissal of the former Finance Minister, and as you all know, they now admit that they “made mistakes” and that its executives managed to ignore “red flags” that came up with regard to the work that they did for the Gupta’s.  KPMG so far has not released their own internal report because they say that the report has sensitive client information about the Gupta’s.

We will have to wait and see if anything else does come out and whether any other companies drop KPMG but this is certainly highly embarrassing for them.

Mission:  Impossible 6 is meant to open in theatres on 27 July 2018.  It is the series based around Tom Cruise and it has certainly done very well over the years.  It is not the kind of movie I have ever taken seriously, but I tend to enjoy them and they are almost always well shot, with expensive sets in exotic locations and they are visually good to look at while relaxing.  I was surprised to read that Tom Cruise does his own stunts and in fact has now broken his ankle in a stunt for the new movie.  

Timing is everything in the movie industry and so this will really put them under quite some pressure to finish filming the movie and then editing it, etc and still open on time.  In South Africa we don’t always realise that almost all of the movies, and when they are released, are based on when an American audience is most likely to watch it and obviously the big movie season is the summer holidays in June and July and ending in August.  The worst weekend of the year – in fact, the worst weekend in the movie industry in the last 17 years – was the third weekend in August this year.  You do not want your film to be released during that time and so none of the major movies would be scheduled for then or early September.  If your movie is already scheduled for release on 28 July and your star has now broken his ankle, you will have to put everything you can together, in one way or another, to make sure that you release on time, because the difference between releasing at the end of July and releasing later in August or September would literally be hundreds of millions of dollars if your movie is expected to be successful.  It also explains why you would generally find a lot more of the rubbish and small budget movies coming out in mid- to late August through to November.

Obviously, it was expected that sooner or later somebody, particularly somebody like Apple, would allow you to make good quality phone calls from your watch.  The Apple Watch, which I use, has now come out with Series 3 which will be available from today, 22 September.  

The watches retail for $329 in the US and we will have to wait and see what they will cost in South Africa, but of course you can also get fancier versions if, for example, you would like the Space Black Milanese Loop together with the Space Black stainless steel case (I can’t see from the website why that is so “amazing” and worth double the money to be honest), that will set you back $749.  The problem with buying the more expensive ones is of course by next year there will be a whole lot of new features, probably a new Apple Watch and yours will no longer have as much value.  

The current Apple Watch is already waterproof, it is very good at tracking your activities and I have no doubt that this version is going to succeed, and succeed in a big way.  I think there is a lot of people who are now on a walk, whp would like to be able to make a phone call, without having to carry their phone.  Of course, there is an ever-increasing level of connectivity which will drive other people nuts!  

About 2 years ago I didn’t think Apple watch was great but I think its become a market leader, sales are up and a lot more younger people, in their 20’s and 30’s are using it now.  Is the new Apple Watch, now that it has the ability to make phone calls as well, something that you would want? 

Today, all around the world people will be downloading the latest version of iOS 11.  I know that it should not be so important, but one cannot ignore the reality of the modern world and how so many people, including those of us who don’t want our children using them, become addicted to these devices.  The truth of the matter is, and the people who used to argue with me about their BlackBerries being the best long ago kept quiet, the iPhone is the leading phone in the world.  Apple is the leading company in the world and the release of their operating system today is huge news around the world, even if there could be far more important topics to actually talk about and no doubt will be.  The bizarre thing of course is if you want to talk about more important topics most people will give you an ignorant answer such as, “I don’t follow the news, I don’t like all the negativity.”  Most people will however know exactly all about iOS 11 by the end of today. Others will complain that Samsung or someone else had some feature long ago – but the truth is that doesn’t capture the imagination of people which is why it wasn’t news then and is now.

The feature that I liked, because of my firm’s involvement in doing motor accident cases, is the new Do Not Disturb feature that now comes with iOS 11.  Your phone will now sense when you are driving and will help keep you from being distracted by calls, notifications and text messages.  Notifications can drive anybody mad – which is one of the reasons why I would switch off all applications from devices such as WhatsApp.  Apple says that people who are trying to message you can be automatically notified that you are driving – which obviously means you have a choice about that.  I think that is fantastic, and anything that increases road safety in that regard would be useful.  At some point we will need to remove people’s privacy in that regard and make it law that the cell phone companies and phone companies will be able to provide evidence immediately as to whether you were using the phone at that time if you are in a motor accident.  We all have a tendency to look down at times, but when that can lead to somebody dying, it is really not acceptable behaviour by any of us. 

iOS 11 is the latest version of the operating system from Apple and it will be available from tomorrow.  According to the Apple website, it makes the world’s most advanced mobile operating system even better.  It of course operates your iPad and your iPhone and it will certainly lead to huge amounts of downloads all around the world tomorrow!

The new features include a new Files app which allows you to search and organise all of your files in one place and works across your apps as well as other services like Dropbox.  It also has a new Dock for the iPad which now shows, across the bottom of any screen on your iPad, which will allow you now to open and switch any of the apps that you want immediately.  They also say it is easier to multitask now in many different ways and use a split view between two apps for example and you can also drag and drop on the iPad more easily by using a split screen with your e-mail and your photographs and it will allow you to drag and drop photographs into your e-mail.  It also makes the Apple Pencil more powerful than before when using it with your iPad which is quite useful sometimes if for example you are working on a PDF and want to make notes or marks and you can also use your Apple Pencil to take instant notes.  The Apple Pencil work with the iPad Pro – that is the huge iPad, so it is not something you can just get if you have any smaller iPad.  

What I found quite interesting is the new document scanner which you can find in Notes, which scans documents for you, crops the edges and then allows you to sign it straightaway with the Apple Pencil!  That might just be a reason for me to purchase the iPad Pro – one always needs an excuse and that seems to be the one for me!  The keyboard is also changing, allowing you to now to see letters and number, symbols, etc all on the same keyboard, without you having to switch back and forth between the different keyboards.  I am sure there are a lot more features, and once you have seen some and tired them, please come back and comment on my blog.  I understand that live photos are changing, you will also be able to pay friends via Apple Pay by simply sending them a message, there will be new filters for the iPhone and a redesigned App Store.  Siri becomes more powerful and there is another feature that interests me, but I will deal with that tomorrow.

I don’t believe that the media is responsible for as much fake news as certain politicians who are in trouble generally claim, although I do think journalistic standards, particularly in South Africa, are not what they were 20 or 30 years ago.  I have written about that too many times to repeat the whole argument here again, but in many instances all that newspapers do is to just reprint press releases that are sent to them.  

What I am talking about though is another aspect and that is the general dumbing down of the media. I understand it in terms of they have businesses to run and sadly, most people these days don’t want to hear intellectual news.  They want to hear about hurricanes, tropical downpours of rain, people navigating the streets in a boat and about the 20 people who have died, all the while ignoring the 40 people who have died on the roads in South Africa that day.  It is all about sensation.  It is all about creating an impression that when a 92% eclipse passes over your head that the sky will at least go gloomy or dark whereas, unless you are in the part of totality, you basically don’t get any darkness at all, although there is a tremendous reduction in the temperature.  

Its all about hyping up a boxing match between one man who is not a boxer and another man who was an absolute champion.  At the end of the day, and as I predicted to all my staff, McGregor stood no chance.  Sure, Mayweather fought his normal fight and cautiously saw what his opponent had to offer, during which time his opponent looked fairly decent, before he clinically dismantled him.  Let’s not forget this was a 40-year-old man who retired two years ago, against a 29 year old man in his absolute peak and despite that massive difference in the young man’s favour, experience still won.  That is because it was his field and that is another reason why we always make the point that you don’t have the expertise to do your own plastic surgery and you don’t have the expertise to do your own Road Accident Fund case.  I thought from the start that McGregor had no chance, despite his massive youth advantage and despite the fact that his opponent was coming out of retirement, because he was getting into a field that is not his.  

The point being though, the media managed to hype this up into one of the greatest events of the world – such that it drowned out any news of any other significance around the world that day.  Two already wealthy men became insanely wealthy and quite honestly I think we all took part in a major con.  The eclipse today, the fight tomorrow and whatever else is cooked up for next week – it is all just, to be honest, trivial nonsense dressed up as actual news when it is nothing of the sort.  The real news like high unemployment continues, people get killed in crime everyday, people die and are maimed on the roads and we distract ourselves from all of it and perhaps we do really want it to distract us.  It is now all about the dumbing down of the media to attract a wider audience and those who are interested in serious news have to look in more specialised areas to find it. 

Today Apple is holding a product launch event and normally this is when one can expect to see the latest and greatest iPhone!  There have been a lot of rumours about what is going to be released on this occasion, including rumours that it will include a new model with a $1,000 price tag, or in other words, about 15% higher than the current iPhones that are available and it might be known as iPhone X.

Apparently, there will also be updated versions of the iPhone 7 as well as the iPhone 7+.  The iPhone 8/X model will be a lot more advanced than the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7+ and the iPhone 8 is going to turn most of the front of the phone into a screen.  Others say that the phone will include a glass body, the full screen which I refer to is known as an edge-to-edge OLED display that totally does away with the home button.  It is likely to have a faster A11 chip and possibly facial recognition and wireless charging.  They say the front-facing camera might include advanced 3D sensing capabilities.

Apple have kept this franchise going for 10 years but its going to become harder and harder to surprise us.  Personally I also hope the camera gets upgraded and the pics get bigger in terms of size and detail.

I came across an article recently about an increasing trend amongst older people to continue studying and to find love at a late age.  I thought this one really took the cake because the man got his last University degree at the age of 86 and recently, at the age of 98, he just got married again.  I wonder what you all think of that?  

On the one hand, obviously people must find love whenever they find it, and if they are happy, they are happy.  I think sometimes it is a bit of a shock to the children, grandchildren and probably, in his case, great grandchildren who might have assumed that the love of his life was their mother/grandmother/ great grandmother.  Is it wrong for people to remarry after the death of their major love of their lives?  What do you think about people studying, I guess for their own interest, because at that point it will not turn into money at that type of age?  What about people getting married at that age? 

I just want to know what applications you find the best to plot your way around the traffic we have.  Traffic is not as bad as in some cities in the world – another thing we cannot really complain too much about in South Africa – other than the route from JHB to Fourways along William Nicol! I have used Google Maps on some devices, but I find that it works well in some cities and not well in other cities.  

I used to have TomTom which manufactures, what I think are bad GPS units, but has excellent software in terms of avoiding traffic.  To me, probably the best, but in some ways inconvenient, because I have to use it on my phone, is Waze.  I think Waze is the best that I found for traffic and I have learned to trust Waze, just as I did with TomTom.  I have a touch screen in my car, it is set permanently on Google Maps and I have no choice about using anything else and so most of the inconvenience comes in the actual positioning of my phone.  So the problem for me with Waze is I have to get all sorts of devices – the latest one being a strong magnet that clips onto the fan grills of your air conditioning unit in your car and then your phone attaches to the magnet. 

Game of Thrones fans are going to be devastated to discover that the final six episodes may well only be coming out in 2019!  We all appreciate that a lot of work goes into filming Game of Thrones, but that is a little bit longer than most of us were hoping to wait!  The final episode of the 7th season set an all time record for the series with the most people ever watching it.  It was already, long before this year, the most popular TV show in the world.  

Don’t forget, when we are talking about viewers, we talk about legal live viewers – some episodes are apparently downloaded as much as 4,2 million times through Bitorrent websites.  It is shown in more than 170 countries, it has more than 160 actors in the cast and that is excluding all of the extras who run to their thousands, including extras who have applied from South Africa and 1,000 staff members and on some days it is simultaneously filmed in three different countries.  The main filming takes place in Belfast, Ireland, but there is quite a lot of filming done in the old town of Dubrovnik, a beautiful city that I visited many years ago in Croatia as well as in Spain and other countries. 

The recent cover of Time Magazine got me thinking about the obsession that many parents have with their kids’ sporting careers.  I was astounded to read how many families are investing in their kids to play sport in America with families spending on average $1,472 per year for a child to play soccer and $4,044 for a child to play baseball.  That covers travelling, private coaches at home for $100 an hour, etc, and so on and so forth while targeting a specific sport from a young age.  The theme of the article was how there is now a hyper-charged sport scene going on and I guess it has been replicated in South Africa, particularly in sports like rugby and cricket.

I think these parents are overdoing it and I take comfort from the research done on top division athletes that found that 88% of them have played an average of two or three sports as children and didn’t focus on just one sport.  In other words, these parents who are driving their kids around, hoping to turn them into future baseball or soccer stars, are making the mistake in focusing on one sport only.  Of course, you can throw Tiger Woods’ name back at me straightaway as the exception, but I am talking about the vast majority who are playing numerous sports.  

They have also found that young athletes who participate in their primary sport only for more than 8 months in a year are also the children most likely to suffer injuries relating to the overuse of those particular muscles, tendons, etc.  The article includes interviews with officials of a small town who built huge sports facilities to attract regional tournaments in their town.  They built 31 fields for soccer in synthetic grass, for example and are hoping that the money they have spent is going to lead to more nearby hotels, etc.  They basically say that their big money-maker is sports tournaments for children under 16 years of age because, once the children are involved, they end up having to bring mom, dad, brothers, sisters and their grandparents on holiday to the town.  What are your thoughts on this and do you have any children who you are driving around the country to participate in events at different towns or is this something that has not really taken off in South Africa yet?

Some family members were speaking to me recently about my kids being involved in a family business one day and what do I feel about that.  I think that that has many problems and one of the problems with hiring family is that invariably you are too soft on family.  I don’t think that being soft on people is always good.  Of course there are times when you need a bit of love, tenderness and sympathy and that is something you get within a family and it is something you can have for trusted members of your workforce as well.  There is no doubt, and I can tell you honestly, that I feel passionately about the futures of some of my employees.  Those who I know do a good job and keep a department rock solid for me are the ones I believe in.  I believe that most of the talented staff members in my firm, even if they are not attorneys, could easily become attorneys.  The fact of the matter is if you are one of my star workers you would already have all the attributes to become an attorney even if you don’t have the actual degree.  I could name off the top of my head at least 5 of my staff right away who are not attorneys or candidate attorneys who would make perfect attorneys if they were prepared to make the sacrifice and study for many years via UNISA (obviously not always easy once you have had children).  

The problem with hiring family is that one tends to be too soft on them and quite honestly there are times when you need to be criticised and corrected.  On the one hand I don’t want my children to be shouted at and told that they are morons, fools or doing something stupid, but if you don’t ever work for anybody else how will you ever face the criticism that you may need to face if you go straight and work for family?  

If I look at my own life – and I don’t think anybody would say that I have been unsuccessful – I still had my biology teacher at Hyde Park High School, Mrs Scott, tell me that I was a moron who would never achieve anything in life.  I’ve still have my run-ins with people, being criticised for the work I was doing and told that I was wrong, etc and I don’t think you would ever get that type of criticism, which is sometimes useful, if you worked for example for your father.  

I would think one of the worse possible things you could ever do is to work for your own father or mother, with the possible exception of my own mother who would happily criticise her own children night and day, because I think you are going to miss out on some things that you need to hear.  

That does not mean for a second that Mrs Scott was right in what she said.  In fact, it shows how clearly ill-suited to teaching she was, but if I was not protected from people who insulted me, inappropriately, incorrectly then why should my children?  Should one always be able to just glide through life without any criticism, anybody saying anything, whether right or wrong?  A boss does have the right to criticise their staff and there is no requirement in law by the way that that criticism has to be justified or correct.  I have certainly criticised staff incorrectly in the past and will do so in the future, whether by mistake or simply not understanding the story properly, but that is what happens in any normal business.  Sometimes you get criticised for things that you did not do incorrectly, sometimes you get praised for things you did not actually do and where perhaps somebody else should have been praised.  Why should my own children be spared the realities of life and how would they be better if everything just went perfectly and nobody ever corrected the little prince or princess?