![]() “The Apple Store is not going to have any of this on display,” Forman said, smiling, scanning the old telephones, microphones, and odd gadgetry. The Apple Store was not near his office.Īnother longtime customer, Mark Forman, a cinematographer and photographer, called Tekserve’s closure “the end of an era, with the most likely competition from Apple itself.” He had been coming to the store since 1994 and said its personal service made it special. He oversaw the recycling of his firm’s computers, and now he would have to find a new venue to do so. One customer on Monday hadn’t realized the store had closed until he walked in. The advice was: Back everything up twice.” We’d try to make them feel a bit calm and put them at ease, and hopefully happy. “People were worried when they came in: Would we able to help them? they wanted to know. Most repairs were done in-house, but if the damage to the hard drive had been too severe, data recovery was undertaken by Kroll Ontrack Inc. “People came in and didn’t know how to use the many features of the Apple computer.” “It was interaction, personal interaction, tutoring,” he said. The in-store boffins would test the machine, tell the customer what was wrong, offer advice, tell them what needed to be done to fix it, and how long that would be. You don’t get the same at the Genius Bar.” He was giving them printouts with addresses of where to take their ailing machines, a very kind Tekserve thing to do.Ĭustomers had come in with many issues, Gilbert said. Gilbert, a “service provider” who helped worried Apple users for six years, said Tekserve’s regulars had been “a little bit thrown off guard” by the store’s closure. ![]() If a computer fails after three years, now you think, ‘Maybe it’s time to get a new one.’” “Apple does a good job with servicing now, and computers have become more like appliances, and more reliable and cheaper. We’re in the middle of Manhattan and we’re one location, so volume is necessarily low, so you can’t compete on price. The overhead for that business is so low. “The internet is the big nail in the coffin. “Now you can buy a Mac almost anywhere, like the Best Buy on the corner,” Demenus added, nodding in that direction. We're bricks and mortar and up against the internet and seven Apple stores. Rents are going sky-high, and it’s a tough business environment for what we do. “I love my business, and it’s sad that it can’t make it in this environment,” he said softly. The slim and handsome Demenus, who declines to give his age, said he was feeling melancholic. Worried you had lost your entire novel/multimedia presentation/lifetime’s poetry/master’s thesis, you’d take a ticket and wait your turn as if at a deli and hope for dear life the sweet-natured specialists would be able to cure whatever ill you presented, or recover whatever had suddenly been lost, or defuse that terrifying fizzing bomb symbol, accompanied by “Sorry, a system error occurred.” Until the all-conquering advent of the Apple stores-of which there are now seven in New York City-Mac users would deliver their sick and malfunctioning machines to the deft fingers, efficient aid, and warm, concise counsel of the experts of Tekserve. Worried about your spluttering laptop, you may have neglected to notice the machines in all their vintage glory. ![]() There are original “Think Different” posters too (including an unreleased one featuring Bob Dylan), old Star Wars plates and dishes, and store fittings, too.įor geeks and tech buffs, this is a treasure trove: They may want to head to Tekserve for the auction, or begin bidding online.Īll the objects up for auction-anything technical is being sold caveat emptor, i.e., without a guarantee it will work-Demenus used as a backdrop for this Chelsea retail landmark. (The “museum” is being sold as one collection, and the bidding is currently at $30,000.)Īrrayed throughout the 25,000-square-foot space are beautiful, vintage radios, dating back to the turn of the early 1900s, old television sets and record players, a 5-cent Coke machine that still works, vintage radio microphones and telephones, and pieces of arcane medical equipment. On Tuesday there will be an auction at the 23rd Street store of Demenus’s entire “museum” of 35 Apple computers, from the first to the most recent. Instead, chairs empty and Tekserve itself now closed, the floor space was dedicated to the astonishing and striking contents of a century-plus-spanning technology collection owned by Dick Demenus, who co-founded this Apple user’s trusted and much-beloved emergency clinic and store 29 years ago. On Monday morning, there were no customers at Tekserve-most famous among them, Harrison Ford, Charlie Rose, and Carrie Bradshaw, in an episode of Sex and The City-sitting on the metal chairs, clutching their laptops and personal technology devices as if they were wounded animals.
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