The impact and nature of the new Apple iPad can be blamed on Elvis.
There they hurled Chappies, Wicks and teddy bears at the building.
They chanted "Ya ain' nuthin' but uh houn' dawg"; they screamed "Ollie out!" and waved placards saying "Walker, take a hike." (This is imaginatively true.)
Continues Below↓The Star made a jump to the left and a jump to the right, then to cosy up to the boppers it renamed its arts section Arts and Entertainment.
When Cliff Richard visited, pictures of adoring disciples even displaced Verwoerd from the front page.
Similarly, pictures of new Apple devices, like the recently launched iPad, can displace Haiti and speculation about stars' sexual quirks. New technology has celebrity status; it is news.
So last week with the new iPad, an object weighing less than a kilogram, nine inches wide and as thin as an emaciated coffee-table book...
In design terms, most personal technology - check your PC, printer or phone - represents the influence of the Clunk School of Design which favours an engineers' and ex-policemen's in-take.
Thus Elvis fans used to listen to Elvis on a gramophone; a CD player only played CDs, the car was for transport, not for showing off.
Even today, the PC remains immured in heavy PC-ness and most cellphones look like cellphones.
Clunk school design literalism believes a phone is a phone and it's misleading to disguise its function. Next people will be putting fur on lav seats.
Apple sidesteps this because it creates objects that did not exist before.
Their objects synthesise many technology-based tasks in one object. The new object houses communication, creation, storage, entertainment, mapping and education.
The bobotie approach replaces the steak-and-chips one. It does this suavely because ugly objects make for unhappy people.
That said, the iPad seems to mostly do what its predecessor fruit of the Apple tree do.
At this point, the voice of the grey mooncalves of Clunk may be heard: "So why would you buy an iPad?"
The reply would involve the senses and a degree of frivolity. "Because they feel and work lekker and do lekker things."
Unlike its family, the iPad doesn't play videos but it is probably better for reading e-books than the rest. Reading a book on an iPhone is a bonsai experience.
Being larger and using colour, the iPad will be more congenial than its competition, whose design approach is to translate the bookshelf and its contents to an electronic setting.
The iPad seems to conceive the book electronically. Where previous e-book readers assume you drop everything else to read, the iPad acknowledges reading as an activity that cohabits with others.
In the 50s and 60s parents would ask with a shiver of hysteria: "How can you expect to concentrate on your homework with that ghastly Elvis Presley warbling away?"
They just didn't understand how Elvis helped with quadratic equations and Caesar.
The iPad is for now. Trouble is, so is money. Elvis earns more annually than The King ever did - R500-million last year.
An iPad purchase - to enable future expenditure on e-books - would mean not buying at least 25 books. This has the allure of craziness.
