Steve Jobs, the tech king, is dead. Long live the tributes. It seems every mag category — from home design to music — devoted space in special editions and regular issues to his passing last Wednesday.

Three years after embarrassingly posting Jobs’ obit on its Web site, Bloomberg Businessweek attempts to make amends. This time around, BBerg rolls out a special, advertising-free issue. The glossy’s coverage largely serves as an unadulterated celebration of the iconic tech guru in candid photos, quotes, articles and graphics. It’s all a bit overbaked. No doubt Jobs is a transformative figure in tech and business, but given the unabashed push by a number of other pubs to roll out similar tributes, we think that BBerg might have missed a chance to “think different,” copying the words of one Apple’s more celebrated ad campaigns.

Among all the rags that have slapped Jobs on their cover this week, the Economist seems nearly alone in its effort to address the key question: what comes next? But the result amounts to little more than hand-wringing, citing “the lukewarm response” to the new iPhone 4S. “Without Mr. Jobs, Apple suddenly looked much more like just another technology firm, rather than a producer of magical products that excite the world,” the mag frets. Indeed, we must admit that Apple faces unprecedented competition with Google-fueled smartphones and a nifty new tablet computer from Amazon.

The New Yorker opts out of the media’s extravagant Jobs mourning ritual, relegating its discussion to the financial column and a “Talk of the Town” piece. In a summation that’s far more sober than most of what’s out there, Nicholson Baker calls Jobs “the king of the world of making good things flow better.” That’s nicely circumscribed praise that gives Jobs his props for creating some of the slickest gadgets of our time. It’s also a nice counterpoint to all those who are breathlessly comparing Jobs to Mother Teresa, George Washington and King David.

New York notes that the “obituarial outpouring” has been “profuse and adulatory in the extreme,” and makes the safe point that among Jobs’ most important creations was “the image of the businessman as freewheeling rebel.” Nevertheless, it can’t help itself from calling Apple’s gadgets “world-altering,” thereby hopping on the bandwagon with media whose “world” apparently doesn’t extend much beyond the neighborhoods of rich America. Elsewhere, immediately after a feature on environmentally friendly design, the mag presents a delectable photo of an albacore tuna steak, noting that it’s “in season” and omitting that it risks being “endangered.”

Newsweek has cranked out a “Special Commemorative Issue” for Jobs, with a cover photo of the young, bowtied-and-suspendered Alex P. Keaton version of what would eventually become the mock-turtlenecked Zen Master. Indeed, there is very little, if anything, in this issue that isn’t backward-looking stuff we’ve already read a dozen times. Editor Tina Brown hires her husband Harold Evans to make the sober argument that while Jobs is being compared to Thomas Edison, he’s more akin to the less-celebrated Edwin Land, who invented the Polaroid camera, and is indebted to countless earlier inventors for his products.

Leave it to Time to throw sobriety out the window on an occasion like this. The once-formidable publication — which famously rankled Jobs in 1982 by passing him over as its “Person of the Year” in favor of “the personal computer” — launches its silly, over-the-top eulogy by declaring that “Steve Jobs remade the world as completely as any single human being ever has.” So move over, Mohammed, Augustus Caesar and Isaac Newton. Jobs “built some of the greatest tools for creativity and self-expression that humanity has ever seen.” Somehow, we remain skeptical of an imminent historic onslaught of unprecedentedly great Mac-generated art.

In unJobs-related mag news, HGTV, the popular home decorating and renovation show, has gone retro and launched a magazine. It’s called HGTV Magazine and while it seems a silly idea on the surface, we got it as soon as we sifted through its glossy pages. As much as we’d like, we can’t be in front of a TV all the time. Plus, it’s easier to save ideas in a magazine with a little something called dogears. The one thing missing was more information on how to make some of the home decorating and renovating ideas come to life post-shopping. As fun as it sounds, we can’t shop our way to beautiful homes, and while a picture may speak 1,000 words, it can’t tell you how to upholster a chair.