Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder, Is Dead

SAN FRANCISCO: 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 Jobs had made on their own lives and businesses. He was, they said, a singular force.

In a statement, President Barack Obama described 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," 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.

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Fans of 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 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 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.

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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 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 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 startup companies, the entrepreneurs and their employees said Jobs gave them something to aspire to.

"He completely changed the way we operate," said Quinn Duffy, 21, an intern at Wimdu, a travel startup. "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' hardware prowess. Brian Speir, a consultant who came to make wedding invitations using a laser cutter, described Jobs as "a legend, on part with any great artist."

"He's meticulous. More than anything, it's not stopping until something's perfect. My fiancee says, 'It's good enough,' and I say, 'Not yet."'

His fiancee, 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 Jobs' death.

"He was really somebody who changed the conversation, for whom good enough wasn't good enough," he said.