Take It To The Mac

New York Daily News, January 16, 2000

The moment you walk into Tekserve's fourth-floor Chelsea loft, you know you've found the epicenter of Mac culture in New York. From the vintage 1930s Coke machine that dispenses ice-cold bottles of the Real Thing at 10 cents a pop, to the legion of black T-shirted minions who scurry about with laptop guts in their hands, the place oozes the kind of energy, fun and creativity that Apple is supposed to be all about.

But Tekserve also offers good service and reliability. Its motto, "Honest Weights; Square Dealings" (borrowed from a Depression-era Walker Evans photo of a rural fish stand) is evocative of policies like free estimates, never touching a machine without the customer's okay and while-you-wait service.

"Anything that can be done in less than an hour, like installing a RAM [random access memory card], we'll do while you're here," says Dick Demenus, a Tekserve partner.

In a refreshing break with the infuriating disregard that many computer repair shops show toward their clients' machines, Tekserve techies consider themselves stewards of their customers' data.

"In many cases," says Tekserve co-owner David Lerner, "what's on the machine is more valuable to you than the machine itself." As a result, Tekserve will never take the quick-and-easy approach to solving a software problem of wiping your hard drive clean and reformatting it.

Tekserve is also one of the few places in New York that does data recovery for damaged Macs. Prices for that service start at a very competitive $75 for small drives. (Tekserve charges $90 an hour for software woes; hardware troubles are done at flat rates that vary by the job.)

Lerner and Demenus come to the business via a circuitous route: They were techies working in public radio who bought some of the first Macs sold in New York in the mid-1980s.

When they couldn't find a qualified service center, they started fixing their own machines and branched out to those belonging to friends.

Within a few years they had set up shop in Demenus' loft. From this humble start, Tekserve has grown to 75 employees and a ranking (by Apple itself) as one of the best Mac service centers in America.

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