Paying tribute to the Apple of our eye

October 7, 2011 at 12:10a.m.

Staff/wire report

He was a conjurer, a modern magician who reached into tomorrow and came up with things that changed millions of lives.

And as people gathered at Apple Stores from Sydney to San Francisco to mourn Steve Jobs, the feeling was more than grief for an executive or even an inventor. It was something closer to awe for a wizard.

On Thursday, the admirers who turned his technological marvels into everyday tools used them as instruments of grief. People held up pictures of candles on their iPads, booted up their MacBook Pros to watch old Jobs presentations on YouTube, used their iPhones to sift through remembrances on Twitter.

Here in the Mahoning Valley, Jobs’ life will be celebrated on the radio from 2 to 3 p.m. Saturday with a special tribute show on WKBN-AM (570), hosted by Joe Danyi, Youngstown Computer LLC owner.

“It’s going to be historical and lay out a little bit of where Steve Jobs came from and the start of Apple to the resurgence through the iMac and mobile devices.” said Danyi, who previously hosted “Youngstown Computer Show” from 2008 through 2010.

Danyi is one who is skeptical about the future of Apple without Jobs.

“He transformed what computers were supposed to be, from a tool to get business done to a computer you can have in your home for personal use,” he said. “It’s going to be interesting how they take Steve Jobs’ creativity and make it survive.”

One of those who has taken advantage of that creativity is Richard Stape, precision machining instructor at Mahoning County Career Technical Center, who uses his iPad 2 for just about everything.

“When you think of the power that it has for such a little thing,” said Stape, who was uploading a few thousand pictures to his iPad on Thursday. “It does almost everything that the computer can do.”

Ten years ago, the only people who carried their music around were tech geeks, music obsessives and those willing to tote a clunky CD player. Presto — the iPod, and everyone wanted one. And then another and another.

Five years ago, cellphones had hinges, and the displays looked more like the age of Atari than the age of the Internet. Texting, for the most part, was a matter of cryptography, tapping out strings of numbers to make words. Presto — the iPhone, and everyone wanted one of those, too.

Two years ago, the economy had just tanked, and it was hard enough for companies to persuade people to buy the things they needed. Getting people to buy a product they didn’t need was out of the question. Most people already had a desktop computer, or a laptop, or a smartphone. And yet, presto — the iPad.

Nothing up his sleeve. Though Jobs, ever the showman, once reached into the tiny fifth pocket of his trademark blue jeans at an Apple event and fished out an iPod Nano, just to emphasize how small the gadget was. They always were. Ever smaller, ever sleeker, ever cooler.

Anne Sweeney, the president of Disney and ABC, remembered when Jobs flew from Cupertino, Calif., to Burbank to persuade her to license ABC shows to be shown on the tiny screen of his newest invention, the video iPod. He wowed them by playing an episode of ABC’s own hit show, “Lost.”

Sweeney was so bowled over she forgot to ask where he got a copy of the program.

“I thought, ‘He’s Steve Jobs. He can do anything,’” she remembered.

One day after his death, 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.

For people who have grown up in a world where iPod headphones are as ubiquitous as wristwatches were to a previous generation, 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 Jobs’ death Wednesday night and remembered him as a “visionary and creative genius.” The company announced no cause of death, but 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 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.