Very respectable that apple would change their whole homepage to pay tribute to someone they care deeply about passing away. Image how much money they are losing by not promoting their new products such as the iPad.
I imagine that they'll get a good amount of press out of this, which will (somewhat) negate their monetary losses here. That said, it's pretty obvious that this is a heartfelt message from the company, props to them for doing what most other companies rarely do and honoring the passing of an influential team member.
I doubt they are losing that much money. I'm not at all trying to detract from the sadness of such a loss, but there are links on the top that people can use, not to mention direct links from search engines taking them directly to where they need to go.
Don't doubt it, they are losing a significant portion of revenue-generating space on a commercial website in order to pay tribute to a fallen friend.
How about all the publicity they got from it for free? I'm sure visits to apple.com got a big bump today thanks to that. Apple.com is on the frontpage of every social sites right now (reddit, digg, hn etc).
Even with added traffic, the conversion rate (visitors/buyers) given the tribute and no products on the front page has to be extremely low. Low enough that I tend to believe they are losing money for the sake of this.
Apple is a company that has billions in cash. Any amount of money lost because of this won't do anything to their bottom line, something like 0.01% maybe less. The amount of free publicity and props they got from that action however are worth millions, I mean, just read what people are saying on this thread, they're all praising apple. How much do you think that's worth as publicity?
0.01% of billions is a lot of money.
To do noble and good things while following your business' charter: this is appropriate and an attractive goal for us businesspeople, if you ask me.