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Been trying to preorder an iPhone 4S tonight? Yeah, me too… I’ve been trying for the last hour and a half and have had to restart the checkout process just about 26 times now.

Well, guess the Apple store has finally given up. Only minutes ago, trying to order an iPhone would have gotten a never-ending series of page timeouts and error messages. But now, Apple is assigning reserved spots so you can come back later, once things are working, to get your order on. Looks like they might have expected this to happen this time around.

How can it be this hard to give a company $300?

Apple promised customers the ability to preorder the new iPhone 4S at 12:01AM Pacific Time on Friday — but the store blew right past that deadline and is still showing a “Back Soon” sign. The Apple Store App is “Back Soon” also.

Verizon’s website is accepting preorders fine, according to a stream of happy tweets on Twitter. But there’s no sign of a pre-order button on AT&T’s website.

iPhone 4S order fail.

Who’s off to bed soon?

UPDATE: The online Apple Store went live for preorders at about 12.40. However, there were lots of complaints of timeouts and other problems. Some customers reported success using the Apple Store App.

I’ve never seen anything like it. This amazing tribute to Steve Jobs was assembled from the parts of a MacBook Pro. It’s truly an astonishing piece of work from the designers at Mint Digital.

Unfortunately, there’s no explanation of how it was done. I’ve sent an email asking how they did it. Here’s a large version.

Steve Jobs has laid plans for his vast $6.5 billion fortune, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has hinted.

Jobs had plans for a “third act,” Schmidt told the New York Times, and hinted that he may yet have another huge impact through the fortune he leaves behind.

Scammers have already taken to Facebook to exploit the death of Steve Jobs. PandaLabs has “detected a malicious link” on Facebook that was making the rounds earlier and claiming victims.

The page was called “R.I.P. Steve Jobs” and a link on the page claimed that 50 free iPads were being given away “in memory of Steve Jobs.” This was obviously a scam, but it seems that over 21,000 Facebook users have already been infected by the malware.

I went to the downtown Apple store this morning.

It was raining. Sort of fitting for the mood at the store.

Several people braved the downpour to pay tribute to Steve. Messages on Post-it notes were covering the front window. It was quite moving actually. Candles were lit and flowers were scattered on the ground.

When it started to hail briefly, I went inside. The mood was somber. The usual high-fiving employees were quiet. One of the employees told me that when they arrived at the store this morning the notes were covering the door. They carefully removed them one by one and placed the notes in rows at the bottom of the window.

While in the store, the David Bowie song Changes started playing. It was sad to hear but fitting. Apple has changed, at least how we know it.

Please check out the rest of the pictures and their captions below. This isn’t a sight exclusive to the San Francisco Apple Store. Similar tributes are happening at Apple Stores all around the world. If Steve was the heart and soul of Apple, even Apple’s fingertips are in mourning today.

Sprint customers can now check their upgrade eligibility if they are interested in purchasing or upgrading to an iPhone 4S. Although the front page declares that this feature is “Coming soon” it was active this afternoon when I checked.

Welcome Sprint customers! Now you have a chance to buy the phone that the rest of us are already enjoying. So what are you waiting for – go check your eligibility now!

Hopefully the Sprint deal you get will be better than the one that AT&T is giving its customers.

Those mother$@#!-ers! The hate mongering, homophobic sons of bitches at the Westboro Baptist Church are already planning on protesting Steve Jobs funeral. And without a hint of irony, they put out the call for the protest using Twitter for iPhone. Those evil, detestable idiots.

I wouldn’t have imagined that Next Media Animation (the guys behind all of those wacky Taiwanese animated news reports) would have had it in them to do a sweet and tasteful memorial to Steve Jobs, especially not within their Sims 3 animation studio, but they did a damned good job, I thought.

I love that St. Peter managed admissions into heaven on an iPad: that must really cut down on a lot of the paper work. Needless to say, in hell, they use Honeycomb tablets to manage all this stuff.

It’s a downer of a day, but here’s something we can all get a little chuck at: in Japan, Apple might need to change the name of iOS 5’s incredible new Siri voice control assistant. Why? Because in Japanese, Siri sounds an awful lot like a bottom.

Shareef Allman, suspected of killing three and wounding seven in a rampage yesterday, has been shot and killed in Sunnyvale.

The search for Allman, 47, shutdown campuses at Apple and Hewlett-Packard yesterday as well as a number of local schools.

For the seventh time, Time Magazine will be appearing on this week’s cover of Time Magazine in a special issue that features a photo essay by Diana Walker, an Apple retrospective by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman, and a six-page essay by Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson.

It’s Isaacson’s essay that really got our eyes misting, because in it, Isaacson talks a lot about the walk he once took with Steve in which he was asked to be Jobs’ biographer. Amazingly, Isaacson turned Steve down.

At first, the two companies seem as different as possible. IBM was part of the personal computer’s birth, while Apple has promoted the post-PC era. However, the young tech giant can take a lesson from the veteran computer company in how to survive the departure of a corporate icon. At the front of the class is Apple CEO Tim Cook, once an IBM exec.

Following this morning’s new that the authorized biography of Steve Jobs had rocketed up the Amazon book charts, its publishers, Simon & Schuster, have announced that the title’s release date has been brought forward to October 24.

Hardware researchers say Apple’s just-released iPhone 4S costs $203 to build, providing similar ‘evolutionary’ advances seen when the tech giant jumped from the iPhone 3G to 3GS. The 32GB iPhone 4S will cost $749 before customer subsidy.

Despite his battle with illness during the years the led to his death, Steve Jobs never stopped inventing products and systems that would do their little bit to change the world. This patent, published just over a year ago, details a concept invented by Steve that could prevent users from inadvertently performing actions on a computer.

Reader H.P. Hansen wrote in with this shots he took outside of Apple’s Cupertino HQ last night. He says: “This picture was taken at the Cupertino Apple campus tonight. It was pretty amazing seeing all the people coming to pay respects. A white iPad 2 remained illuminated with Apple’s homepage of Steve.”

A couple more shots after the jump.

We all knew this was coming, and as journalists, we all knew we had to prepare for the worst. Even so, Cult of Mac never prepared an obituary for Steve Jobs, standard practice in the news game. He was too close to us, too much of a father figure. We tried to start one a dozen times over the years, but something always stopped us from being able to finish it: respect, love, a secret belief that as much of a personality as Jobs was could never really die, you name it. Putting our pens to paper to contemplate his death before it happened, it hurt too much.

Now he’s gone, and our hearts are too heavy to write a proper obituary. We miss Steve, and we just don’t have the distance yet. Instead, we’ve decided to put together the best pieces of all the obituaries out there to give our readers an overview of Steve’s incredible life. We hope it will be a jumping off point for you in a day best spent reading about Steve’s life, remembering the visionary he was and contemplating how we all can fill the void he has left.

If you need any more proof of how many lives Steve touched in his 56 years on this world, look no further than any newspaper frontpage in any country or city on Earth. The entire planet is mourning today.

Reaction on Wall Street and elsewhere to the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs Wednesday night is mixed. Analysts appear to be walking a fine line between reassuring worried investors and discounting the contribution Jobs made to the tech giant.

One of the most memorable ads of the Think Different campaign was Crazy Ones, Apple’s tribute to the rebels, the troublemakers, the ones who see things differently. And the ones who change the world. Back in August when Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO, AdWeek released a revision to this heroes tribute, adding Jobs to the end of the sequence. With Steve’s passing we decided to run this video again.

Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple and perhaps the most influential American CEO of his generation, died Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jobs may or may not have graced more magazine covers than any CEO of the last century (eight times on the cover of TIME magazine, alone), may or may not have been responsible for more changes to the consumer electronics landscape than any other businessman, and may or may not have single-handedly saved the music industry with Apple’s iTunes.

What is certain, however, is that in the coming days more ink and more pixels will be dedicated to his life, his career, and his influence on modern culture than that usually reserved for heads of state and the most popular figures of stage and screen.

Here then, is a Cult of Mac round-up of some of our favorite images of Steve Jobs, from his early days until some of those toward the end of his all-too-brief journey with us in this life.

Enjoy.

He may have ushered in the personal computer; the iPod; the iPhone; the iPad; the modern operating system; the animated movie; but I bet this is the Steve his kids & family will forever remember and miss.

Steve certainly had a reputation for being a tyrant, but for me, these images put aside Steve Jobs the legend, the myth, and giving us rare glimpse into Steve Jobs the man. The normal, quite human, man.

These priceless images were captured in the office of former Apple employee (and Delicious Library creator) Mike Matas. See the whole series below.

Steve Jobs was an extraordinary visionary, our very dear friend and the guiding light of the Pixar family. He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined. Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply ‘make it great.’ He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar’s DNA. Our hearts go out to his wife Laurene and their children during this incredibly difficult time.

– John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer & Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios