Bad month for Apple repairs as Tekserve to close

[brooklynite]

9 to 5 Mac:

Tekserve, the go-to third-party store for Apple product repairs in New York City, has announced that it is to close after 29 years. The service center will close at the end of the month, and the retail store on 15th August, reports the NY Times.

It was the Apple Store in New York City before there was such a thing as an Apple Store.

Before iPods and iPads and iPhones, before Apple started selling and servicing its devices out of a glass cube on Fifth Avenue, the eclectic Tekserve store on West 23rd Street in Manhattan was where customers went for upgrades to their PowerBook laptops or to have their computers fixed.

If the service center photo looks familiar to those outside NY, it’s because it’s such a fixture in the city that it featured in a Sex and the City episode, where Carrie’s Mac crashed (video below) …

Sad: I've known one of the owners since Tekserve was founded; they'd alway set aside a unit for me when a new product came out.

[PJMcK]

1. Huge bummer

TekServe has been a life saver for me dozens of times since the early 1990's. This is a huge loss for NYC Mac users.

I, too, used to know one of the owners, David Lerner, who I met through a mutual friend, a young man named David Pogue. David P., of course, was an early proponent of the Mac and he was the president of NYMUG, the New York Mac Users Group. I think I remember going to a couple of meetings held at their original location. He would go on to have a rather brilliant career as a technology writer, author and musician. I lost touch with David L. but always went to his store for my computer needs.

The original space was several floors above its current street level location. You got off this old elevator and entered a computer hobbyist's playroom. It was crowded with equipment, a lot of it old relics like old radios and tape recorders. Later, they would display a collection of Apple computers through the years, kind of an historical museum trip down computer memory lane. There were these large white boards that had the computer products available with listings of models, CPU speeds, amounts of RAM and prices. The young people who worked there were always polite, knowledgable and interested in your needs. Their prices were competitive and they always had the extra computer stuff one needs, like cables, books, memory chips and many other accessories.

It occurred to me, the last time I was there, that there was a different feeling to the place. It wasn't quite as busy- I guess the Apple Stores have sliced into their customer base- and now I know it was a sense of doom that overhung the place. In the past, their technicians always made any repairs or upgrades themselves. This time, however, all they did was act as a middleman between me and Apple's repair facility. In fact, they completely mis-diagnosed the problem I had; it didm't matter as the repair was a fixed-cost service. Still, it was curious.

TekServe was the place to go to see new equipment, talk with other users and techies and hear gossip, tips and tricks for computer users. i'll miss them.