The tributes pouring in after the death of Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs Wednesday are effusive, even to the point of a bit overdone.

Jobs’ Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak, told the Associated Press, “We’ve lost something we won’t get back. The way I see it, though, the way people love products he put so much into creating means he brought a lot of life to the world.”

I’ve used both Macs and PCs since I drove into the full-time work world in 1988. The Grant County Herald Independent in Lancaster used the second iteration of Macs to print stories, headlines, photo captions and parts of ads. The process by which newspapers used to do layout is too complicated to explain here (do a Web search for “Compugraphic” for details).

I write the modern way of starting to write, going back into a story to insert something, moving paragraphs around, improving the lead, etc. All of that used to have to be done on a typewriter on which every insertion or change meant retyping the entire page. (Or in the alternative having several pages with just one or two paragraphs on them, often placed behind a page on which “INSERT HERE” is written in.) I have a hard time imagining being able to write more than one or two pages of copy in the old way.

At the risk of sounding like a tech geek, I’ve always been more of a fan of Macintoshes than PCs. In fact, the only Mac we bought is still in our basement. Our kids occasionally play Tetris and Shanghai, and it still has a number of sound files I created on it.

I’m guessing that Jobs and Michelle Malkin didn’t see eye to eye much politically. But Malkin may have written the best tribute to both Jobs and the economic system that allowed him to serve customers, hire and pay employees, and personally profit:

There is perhaps no greater image of irony tonight than that of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-materialist extremists of the Occupy Wall Street movement payingtributetoSteve Jobs — the co-founder, chairman and former chief executive of Apple Inc., who passed away this evening.

While the Kamp Alinsky Kids ditch school to moan about their massive student debt, parade around in zombie costumes, and whine about evil corporations while Tweeting, Facebook-ing, blogging, and Skype-ing their “revolution,” it’s the doers and producers and wealth creators like Jobs who change the world. They are the gifted 1 percent whom the #OWS “99 percent-ers” mob seeks to demonize, marginalize, and tax out of existence.

Inherent in the American success story of the iPhone/iMac/iPad is a powerful lesson about the fundamentals of capitalism. The Kamp Alinsky Kids scream “People over profit.” They call for “caring” over “corporations.”

But the pursuit of profits empowers people beyond the bounds of imagination.

I am blogging on an iMac. When I travel, I use my MacBook Pro. I Tweet news links from my iPhone. My kids are learning Photoshop and GarageBand on our Macs. I use metronome, dictation, video, and camera apps. I use Apple products for business, pleasure, social networking, raising awareness of the missing, finding recipes, and even tuning a ukulele.

None of the people involved in conceiving these products and bringing them to market “care” about me. They pursued their own self-interests. Through the spontaneous order of capitalism, they enriched themselves — and the world.

In fact, after reading this from Arizona State University Prof. G. Pascal Zachary, I’m more a fan of Jobs than I was before:

What does Apple’s Steve Jobs know about the politics of science and technology that other industrial tycoons don’t?

The answer is not merely that Jobs sticks to his knitting, churning out new Apple products that strike a compelling engineering balance between emerging and stable technological elements. Jobs is not simply apolitical—he’s antipolitical.

Instead of making hefty personal donations or having Apple mount Washington, D.C., lobbying efforts in the manner of a Google or a Microsoft, Jobs relies on his star power, his celebrity. When he met with President Obama in October, the White House pointedly announced that the president had sought the meeting, not Jobs. “He’s eager to talk to him about the economy, innovation and technology, education,” Robert Gibbs told the press. …

Yet while cultivating friends in high places and capitalizing on his personal legend, Jobs doesn’t view political action as strategic to Apple’s business or to its capacity for innovation. All kinds of industrial giants routinely ask the federal government for assistance in supporting their innovation capacity, but not Apple.

Jobs has studiously avoided explaining to the public why he doesn’t seek federal aid for Apple’s innovation capacity or competiveness strategy. People close to him over the years say he sees himself as a “progressive industrialist” who eschews moral gestures and views succeeding in the marketplace with innovative products as his central mission in life. His unwillingness to follow conventional approaches to handling government affairs stands in stark contrast to other high-tech leading companies, even some in the computing and Internet fields. …

To be sure, the obvious point is worth making: When people supposedly in charge of innovating spend so much time and money seeking special favors from government, either their innovations aren’t very compelling, or maybe they know that innovating isn’t the way to succeed in business after all.

As with many achievers, Jobs influenced even those he never met, such as Om Malik:

Every generation has its heroes. I was too provincial to love the Beatles and cry over John Lennon. I was too Indian to care much about Elvis. And I read about President Kennedy in books. But for me, Steve Jobs was all of those people. I don’t know why, how and where that happened but Jobs was my icon.

For many of us who live and die for technology and the change it represents, he was an example of what was possible, no matter how the chips were stacked against you. Jobs put life and soul into inanimate objects. Everyone saw steel, silicon and software; he saw an opportunity to paint his Mona Lisa. People saw a phone; Steve saw a transporter of love. People saw a tablet; he saw smiles and wide-eyed amazement. They made computers; he made time machines that brought us all together through a camera, screen and a connection.

Mac, iPod and iPhone — they are like Silicon Valley’s Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and E.T. — magical, memorable and life-changing. And perhaps that is why I didn’t want to meet him, interview him or even talk to him. I had the opportunity on numerous occasions when I was attending Apple’s events, but I decided not to. To me, just the idea of Steve was powerful enough.

The idea of Steve led me to follow my heart, make tough choices, be brutally honest with myself (and sometimes annoying to people I love) and always remember that in the end, it is all about making your customers happy. There are simple ways to get along with everyone. There are easier ways to get things done. There are compromises. But to me Steve Jobs meant try harder, damn it, your customers (readers) expect better than that. Steve taught me to care about the little things, because in the end, little things matter.

In September, Jeffrey A. Tucker added:

Every time I slip on a pair of shoes, I think of the marvels of entrepreneurship and the division of labor that make my foot comfort possible. I have the same sense for those who make my refrigerator, provide lettuce for my salad, create alarm systems for my home and car, own and run chain stores that sell everything from pet food to paper clips, sell me insurance, build our homes and offices, and make it possible for me to buy a plane ticket with a few clicks on a computer — or finger swipes on a smartphone.

Every entrepreneur in society deserves such praise, and it is also correct to single out Steve Jobs, because his company seemed to push civilization a bit further down the road to progress with mind-blowing consumer products that allow us to do everything from play musical instruments to video talk with people halfway across the world in real time. Apple has dramatically improved our lives — in the same way that all capitalistic ventures have but more conspicuously so. …

What made Jobs’s tenure at Apple great is that he wedded profits with aesthetic loveliness. Not every businessperson can or should do this. Even the entrepreneurs who provided the masses with tacky things are just as deserving of our admiration and praise, for they too do their part to lift us all out of the poverty and squalor that is the state of nature.

And aside from the prettiness of certain products or the elegance of the smartphone, there is another overarching beauty that we find in the market: a lovely, orderly, productive global matrix of cooperative exchange that leads to human flourishing for everyone, even in the absence of a global dictator. This is as beautiful a system as any product Steve Jobs ever made.

The irony of the timing of Jobs’ death is that President Obama is trying to con Congress into passing his guaranteed-to-fail jobs bill. I had to repost this from  Twitter:  “Another Steve Jobs would create a whole lot more jobs than Obama’s ‘jobs bill.’”

The additional irony is that those without enough to do are occupying Wall Street instead of, you know, working. The Anchoress notes:

I confess, my geek husband and Elder Son appreciated his multi-layered genius much better than I ever could — I referred to him as “the guy who is making our lives look like Star Trek” — but even I am smart enough to know that Steve Jobs’ was a rare and exotic mind. I wonder if he is the last [publicly apolitical] capitalist we’re going to be permitted to admire for his creativity, his invention and his sheer genius?

Jobs’ amazing accomplishments and, yes, failures should allow him his own last word:

“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.”