No details on either the news or Apple's website, but Apple has an email for condolences and going to www.apple.com now gives just a simple home page with a picture of Steve and his dates.

Mendalla

Steve Jobs was a visionary.   He will be missed.  I've been the owner of Mac computers for 25 years.  I hope Apple products continue with their excellence and innovation as a tribute to Steve.

So true Mandalla: "The PC industry is too young to be losing its founders."

UK IT news site The Register is doing an in-depth profile/bio of Jobs. Part 1 is up, covering from his birth to his return to Apple in '97 and the first generation of the iMac. Presumably Part 2 will cover the Mac revival and the moves into consumer electronics and entertainment that led to the iPod, iPhone, iTunes and, most recently, the iPad.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/06/steve_jobs_bio_1/

Thinking back, it's kind of funny that the guy who set out to battle IBM in the eighties (c.f. the famous Apple 1984 Superbowl commercial), ended up competing more with the likes of Sony in the 00s, though the move to the smartphone and tablet as a computing platform in the last 4 years may, in the end, redefine computing far more than either the Apple II or the Mac did.

Mendalla

From the New York Times,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/technology/jobss-death-prompts-grief-and-tributes.html?ref=global-home

By MATT RICHTEL

Artist, role model, innovator, life-changer. Those words popped up repeatedly on Wednesday in the outpouring of emotional responses to the death of Steve Jobs.

Many people described the impact they felt Mr. Jobs had made on their own lives and businesses. He was, they said, a singular force.

In a statement, President Obama described Mr. Jobs as one of “the greatest of American innovators” who exemplified the country’s ingenuity. “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented,” Mr. Obama said.

And many passed along the news with their iPads and Macintoshes and iPhones, simply because these devices of his creation had become so integral to their daily lives.

Twitter briefly buckled under the mass of Jobs-related messages, a veritable technology 21-gun salute.

Fans of Mr. Jobs paid tribute too in a more traditional way — with flowers and silence. Outside the flagship Apple store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, people had left two bouquets of roses and some candles late Wednesday, and some sat around quietly using their Apple laptops.

By 11 p.m., the crowds gathering outside the store were thickening. Roughly three dozen people stood outside talking about Mr. Jobs, and many people stopped to take photos of the building even though its exterior, an iconic glass cube, was covered for remodeling.

At an Apple store in the meatpacking district in New York, someone left an apple, with one bite taken out of it, mimicking the Apple logo. A note read: “iThankYou.” There were also flowers outside of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, took to his own page on the site to write: “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

Eric E. Schmidt, the chairman of Google, whose company has become a competitor to Apple in the phone business, said: “Steve defined a generation of style and technology that’s unlikely to be matched again.”

People in the technology field described Mr. Jobs as someone they could only look up to — and try to emulate.

At RocketSpace, a technology incubator in downtown San Francisco that is home to 94 start-up companies, the entrepreneurs and their employees said Mr. Jobs gave them something to aspire to.

“He completely changed the way we operate,” said Quinn Duffy, 21, an intern at Wimdu, a travel Web site. “He’s a pretty good model for someone who wants to take a smaller company and become a global force.”

TechShop, a warehouse in San Francisco equipped with high-tech tools, attracts the kind of people who might have been inspired by Steve Jobs’s hardware prowess. Brian Speir, a consultant who came to make wedding invitations using a laser cutter, described Mr. Jobs as “a legend, on par with any great artist.”

“He’s meticulous,” Mr. Speir said. “More than anything, it’s not stopping until something’s perfect. My fiancée says, ‘It’s good enough,’ and I say, ‘Not yet.’ ”

His fiancée, Megan Hoak, added: “And when he says that, he always refers to Steve.”

At an Apple store in San Francisco, David Lauder-Walker, 42, was buying headphones for his iPhone when he got a text from a friend about Mr. Jobs’s death.

“He was really somebody who changed the conversation,” he said, “for whom good enough wasn’t good enough.”

Here's a good article link that Moderator Mardi Tindal posted on her Twitter feed (@marditindal):

@MardiTindal: Kwok Pui Lan on what Steve Jobs might teach us about theology & God outside our little boxes http://bit.ly/qrls0X

Here's an excerpt:

"...I wish theologians have a better aesthetic sense when we create our theological systems. Aquinas’ theology has a cathedral-like design, with transepts and side-chapels, flying arches and vaults. Paul Tillich pictured his systematic theology as a mountain, and drew a detailed sketch of the various sections of the work. 

Jobs wants us to forget about the technology when we use Apple products. He makes them so intuitive that you can figure out by playing with them. When you see the clock icon on your iPhone, you know what it stands for. 

Technology should not stand between you and life, he says. Theology should be like that too. Yet so much theology has been written to make you feel so stupid that you wonder what it is about. This ensures that there are always the theo-novices to depend on the theo-geeks. 

But Jobs’ greatest legacy is in the Apple’s slogan—think different. When no one thought that there would be a market for personal computers, he and Wozniak created one from scratch in his garage. When computers were in black and beige colors, the iMac came out in astonishingly bondi blue, bright orange, and lime green. 

Think different. God is still waiting to come out from the little boxes we have created. Who will write the first iTheology to start a game change? "

Jobs himself put out some remarkably spiritual thoughts at times. The 2005 Stanford commencement address has been quoted in a number of articles in the wake of his death.

Mendalla

Sigh. The Westboro Baptist crowd are threatening to picket the Jobs funeral. And using iPhones to do it . Regardless of what Margie Phelps thinks, God did not create the iPhone - Steve Jobs (or at least his employees) did.

Mendalla

That Stanford address shows that Steve Jobs was so much more than a geek and a successful business man.

He was also a philosopher - in that he thought about the big questions of life that confront us all.

Here's more -

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Love that quote, too. Oui has posted Stanford's video of the speech in another thread over in R&F.

Mendalla

LOL!! 

so, phelps and co think that god invented the iphone??  really??  cause it was pretty much steve jobs who invented the iphone, so they have now said that steve jobs is god?!?!?

ah, westboro baptist is just a never-ending source of humour, aren't they!?!?

I sometimes wonder if the Phelps family are starting to *get* the fact that the broader society treats them like a joke and are using it to their advantage. "Acting like you're bats**t crazy about religion gets you more attention" sort of thing. The fact that they are packing iPhones and using social media suggests that, for a bunch of alleged religious loons that even the religious right tries to ignore, they are rather plugged in to the broader world.

Mendalla

Looks like the Jobs family gets the last laugh. Word in the tech and business press is that the funeral happened in private and unannounced on Friday. Apple is going to have an event for its employees at some point but no public memorials are planned, so not really anything for the Phelps' to picket.

Mendalla

Ten surprising facts about Steve Jobs:

1. He tried LSD: He reportedly said it was "One of the two or three most important things I have done in my life."

2. He dated Joan Baez: Jobs dated the folk singer when he was in his 20's.

3. He was a vegetarian: PETA praised Jobs for his vegetarianism and his support of animals.

4. He saved Pixar: Jobs purchased the company from George Lucas' LucasFilm for $5M in 1986. The first film produced by Pixar under Jobs was the critically acclaimed "Toy Story."

5. He was Disney's largest shareholder: He became Disney's largest shareholder when the company bought Pixar in 2006.

6. He was offered an internship with Hewlett-Packard ... in eighth grade: As an eighth-grader, he called William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to inquire about a part missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, the New York Times reports. Hewlett reportedly spoke to Jobs for 20 minutes, then offered him a bag of parts and a summer internship.

7. He and Steve Wozniak originally sold "blue boxes": The duo reportedly built so-called "blue boxes" that could trick phones into allowing users to make free calls to anywhere in the world. They reportedly raised a total of $6,000.

8. He was homeless: “I didn’t have a dorm room,” he said in a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, “so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."

9. He patented the glass staircase in the Apple Store: He is listed among the group of inventors for 317 Apple patents.

10. He drove without a license plate for years: Jobs drove his 2007 Mercedes-Benz SL55 for years with no official license plate, just a barcode, according to USA Today.

Actually, given how much power Jobs got at Disney in the Pixar deal, the joke was that Pixar took over Disney rather than other way around.

The profile I read didn't mention the connection to Hewlett, but rather than the Jobs family lived next door to HP engineer Larry Lang who was one of Steve's mentors. Also, Steve Wozniak worked at HP for a time before the founding of Apple.

And on Jobs & Woz's blue boxes: Yep, they started out as "phreakers", guys who used various technological tricks to get free phone calls. Basically, the ancestors of modern hackers.

One that Neo  left out: Jobs' first real job was at game company Atari where he developed the prototype for the game Breakout (ancestor of numerous current games including the Brick Breaker game found on every shipping Blackberry) from a concept by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Apparently (per The Register's profile of Jobs) he used to let Woz come over to the Atari offices and play his favourite game in return for technical assistance on projects. The story is that it was Woz's design for the Breakout game console (this was in the days when each console only played a single game) that Jobs submitted and that Jobs never gave Woz any of the bonus he received because of it.

Mendalla

Part 2 of The Register's profile of Jobs is up. Thought this quote (from the author, an avowed Apple fanboi) was an interesting summation:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/10/steve_jobs_bio_2/

Mendalla