The co-founder of iconic New York Mac computer shop Tekserve has died. I learned about Tekserve after I moved to New York from Berkeley in 2014. My new employer, The Intercept, dealt in sensitive files (e.g. from the Snowden archive of NSA documents) and had a healthy paranoia about buying things like laptops online.
Tekserve was very close to our first office on 5th Ave. The Intercept, funded by the founder of eBay, had a very tech startup-y approach to IT: I was told to walk over there and buy whatever I needed. My boss told me they sold to pretty much all the news media outlets in the city.
I opted for a little Macbook Air with an 11 inch screen, maxed out on RAM and flash storage (I think we still called those SSDs). I also bought an NEC MultiSync monitor (27 inches?) since I'd wanted one of those since I was a teenager, and also because my wife's uncle (by then retired) was an NEC sales rep traveling to the U.S. for many years. And an external keyboard and trackpad.
I remember being awed by the size of the store. I also remember distinctly that there was already another Ryan Tate in the database -- I gave them my name and they asked something like, "OK ya you live on <address in Manhattan>?" And I said no, must be a different Ryan Tate, I live in Brooklyn. (I had probably met this other Ryan Tate, probably it was the chef whose SoHo restaurant Savoy I visited right before it closed, maybe two years before all this, on a trip to NYC, and he came out that night to say hello to his name twin.)
It was probably the nicest, smoothest, most informative sales process I've been through at any computer store. I had done the Apple store thing to buy two Macs at this point, it was fine but always a lot of standing around (this has not changed) and at no point did I feel like someone on staff knew more than me about what I was buying. Tekserve flipped that around. It was all very human. I remember something at some point got mixed up about the monitor but they corrected the mistake on the spot.
I did deal with two Mac stores in Berkeley, M.A.C. on University Ave, which was great but much smaller than Tekserve. Actually they are still around it looks like! When I went there, as I recall, they were up a narrow flight of stairs in a second-floor retail space not even a block from the university. Indie Mac stores always felt a bit like pirate operations in the best way, and M.A.C. definitely was part of that aesthetic. I also got my first Mac from the UC Berkeley computer store (do those exist any more?).
I also patronized my friend Thomas Oh's Mac consultancy, Platinum Systems, also based in Berkeley (I can't remember if they ever had an office). He upgraded my Performa 636CD.
Tekserve went out of business in 2016, under pressure from company-owned Apple Stores, including a spectacular-looking one on 5th Ave.
The Apple Stores were an excellent move for Apple and its customers, but I always thought it was crummy and cheap that Steve Jobs' Apple didn't throw a bone to the indie shops that supported the company for decades, including when it was on the ropes. There's a thing I learned about recently called Record Store Day, where recording labels support indie shops with special vinyl releases and deals. There was a half block line out the door of my local record store for this last year. Apple could have had something similar, with some exclusive windows here and there for indie shops on some products or versions of products.
Anyway, it was nice to read about what a decent person and boss David Lerner was at Tekserve.