WORLD: Apple fans ‘iSad’ Steve Jobs
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Apple fans around the world are mourning the death of Steve Jobs.
From Sydney, Australia, to London, they paid tribute Thursday to the company’s founder in messages posted on Twitter and Facebook, and by creating makeshift shrines in front of Apple stores.
“I was so saddened. For me it was like Michael Jackson or Princess Diana — that magnitude,” Stephen Jarjoura, 43, told the Associated Press outside the company’s flagship store in Sydney.
Among the topics trending on Twitter Thursday were ‘ThankYouSteve’ and “iSad.”
In China, one of Apple’s fastest-growing markets, fans took pictures of the flowers, cards, photographs and apples lying on the pavement outside stores in Beijing and Shanghai.
Within hours of the news of Jobs’ death, more than 63 million messages had been posted on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblogging site, according to the official New China News Agency.
‘It is like a giant star falling from the sky,’ user Wei Jinhuan was quoted as saying.
‘His creativity and imagination astonished the whole world. His death means the end of an era,’ wrote another user, Li Rong.
Photographs show that in Japan, people held iPads and iPhones displaying a candle graphic at a vigil outside a store in the Ginza district of Tokyo.
A single bunch of flowers wrapped in plastic lay outside Apple’s flagship store in London, BBC reported. Ginnie Leatham, from West Sussex, bought a single red flower and presented it to staff inside the store.
‘I was really sad when I woke up this morning,’ she told the BBC. ‘I had a real lump in my throat and felt quite tearful. I was thinking about it on my commute into work. I always walk past the Apple store and I just thought ‘I’m going to stop.’’
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-- Alexandra Zavis in Los Angeles
