Steve Jobs was mourned around the world Thursday through the very devices he conceived: People held up pictures of candles on their iPads, reviewed his life on Macintosh computers and tapped out tributes on iPhones.
One day after his death, and two days after Apple introduced the latest incarnation of a touch-screen phone that touched pop culture, sadness and admiration poured out - not for a rock star, not for a religious figure, but for an American corporate executive.
“He was a genius,” Rosario Hidalgo said outside an Apple Store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan while her daughter, 21-month-old Carlotta, used an iPhone to play an app that teaches children to match animal sounds to animal pictures.
By people who have grown up in a world where iPod headphones are as ubiquitous as wristwatches were to a previous generation, Mr. Jobs was remembered as their Elvis Presley or John Lennon. Perhaps even their Thomas Edison.
“It’s like the end of the innovators,” said Scott Robbins, 34, who described himself as an Apple fan of 20 years and who rushed to an Apple Store in San Francisco when he heard the news.
Apple announced Mr. Jobs’ death Wednesday night and remembered him as a “visionary and creative genius.” The company announced no cause of death, but Mr. Jobs had been diagnosed with a rare pancreatic cancer seven years ago and had a liver transplant in 2009. He was 56.
On Thursday, the Apple website, which usually features slick presentations of multicolored iPods and ever-thinner MacBook laptop computers, simply displayed a black-and-white photo of Mr. Jobs, thumb and finger to his beard as if in contemplation.
Around the world, tributes sprang up of the highest and lowest technology.
In the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo, people held up iPhones and iPads, their screens facing outward and displaying sharply defined, touchable graphics of flickering candles.
At an Apple Store in Hong Kong, old and new means of grief came together: People scribbled “RIP” and “We miss Steve” and longer notes of condolence on Post-it notes and stuck them to an iPad display.
And at the 24-hour Apple Store in midtown Manhattan, the remembrances were more traditional. Passers-by left flowers and candles - actual ones. Even there, people snapped pictures of the memorial with their iPhones.
“I was so saddened. For me, it was like Michael Jackson or Princess Diana - that magnitude,” Stephen Jarjoura said at the Apple Store in Sydney. He said Mr. Jobs left a legacy to rival Edison and Albert Einstein.
Philippe Meunier, a senior partner of a Canadian ad agency who was visiting New York from Montreal, reflected on how weird it was to receive the news of Mr. Jobs’ death on the phone he invented.
Apple has sold 129 million iPhones and 29 million iPads. And in the decade since it revolutionized the music industry by offering “1,000 songs in your pocket,” it has sold 300 million iPods, or roughly enough to outfit every person in the U.S.
• AP writers Karen Matthews, Jocelyn Noveck and Zeina Karam contributed to this report.
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