Not affection, reverence, even deification to a degree.
The cult of Mac is real, a lot of Apple junkies (and that’s the only way to describe many of them) buy Apple products for no other reason than because they’re there, it’s a sort of offering on the altar of Jobs.
So Jobs dies, their God is gone (or at least his prophet, for many of them the company itself is the deity).

Make that deal with whom, exactly?

I seriously doubt the thought of dying at 56, wealthy and accomplished, gave Jobs one microiota of comfort. In fact, his public postures were those of denial, OK, untruthfulness, right up to the end.

Only his family and his docs know the story, and they ain’t saying.

I don’t feel sad about Jobs, either. But I appreciated and was deeply moved by Reagan’s farewell speech. We never heard anything like that man’s honesty from Jobs, and he had plenty of time to do that.

http://allaboutstevejobs.com/being/3-work/3-work.html

With anecdotes about him as the “shithead/hero roller coaster” boss.

Part of people’s reactions to his death was due to its suddenness. We knew he was very ill, but there were no advance warnings during his very last days.

To me it’s a bit like Jim Henson’s death. Very sudden (in his case unfortunately due in part to his reluctance to seek medical attention).

For example, Apple recently sued Google for copying the iPhone Operating System’s look and feel in Android, Google’s own smartphone operating system. That’s Apple going back to its old nastiness, back to the days of suing Microsoft and Digital Research for copying the interface of the original Macintosh Operating System in their Windows (1.0) and GEM, respectively. An interface that, as Matthew Walker has mentioned, was originally a Xerox invention. “We are here to bring innovation to the world,” with the caveat, “but you’re going to get it only from us.” One could say maximizing your profits is the essence of capitalism; OK, but what I like far better about Microsoft is that they’re honest about it, while Apple hides behind a mask of altruism.

There are a lot of other examples of Apple’s roughshod treatment of its devoted followers, all under Jobs’ management. Beta version testing is a service to the software developer, yet Apple made people pay for the beta version of Mac OS X. Any company, but especially one dependent on hardware sales, ought to court developers to its platform, yet Apple sees fit to charge $99 for a license to develop for the iPhone. Sincere fan contributions such as Hexley, the platypus mascot for the Darwin operating system kernel, have been cold-shouldered by Apple, with an additional warning to abstain from attaching the Apple logo to that mascot, on pain of lawsuit filing.

Apple has behaved in the corporate scene and treated its loyal base far worse than Microsoft, yet Microsoft gets vitriol for petty things while the worst from Apple is excused as, “Yes, some of your points have merit, but you gotta see things from Apple’s point of view.” Why such a double standard? The answer I came up with long ago and still stick to is what’s termed Underdogma, the excusing of the minority player’s wrongs just for being a minority player, hand in glove with not cutting the big guy the slightest slack–the twin prejudices of “Plight Makes Right” and “Strong Is Wrong.” That’s a hippie thing, and if there’s anything I hate it’s hippie things and ways of thinking. Steve Jobs’ youth was in the 1960s, and it shows throughout his life and his work. His achievements were real, but I could have less of that mixture of smugness and do-gooder attitude that oozes from each and every one of his achievements (and that goes for those outside Apple as well, such as Pixar).