When legendary Mac repair shop Tekserve closed its doors last summer in New York City, Apple fans of a certain age experienced two deaths.
They bade goodbye to the original Genius Bar, technicians that had been servicing their devices for nearly 30 years. Those fans would also never again stare at Tekserve’s impressive Apple computer artifact collection, which was quickly auctioned off to an unknown bidder for $47,000.
The collection returned to a museum display today, more than 4,600 miles away in the Ukraine. Its new home is at the headquarters of software developer MacPaw.
MacPaw buys Tekserve’s Mac Museum
Based in Kyiv, MacPaw is the maker of apps like CleanMyMac, Gemini and Setapp. The shop was founded in 2008 by a then 22-year-old college student named Oleksandr Kosovan. He got hooked on Apple when he laid eyes on a wireless keyboard, for which he paid an entire month’s salary.
“Apple changed my life in many ways,” Kosovan said. “Driven by (Steve Jobs’) vision for better and simpler products, I was able to implement these ideas in our products’ development. I can not thank Apple enough other than paying this great tribute to the history of iconic Apple products by setting up a museum.”
Apple’s history is scattered all over the world in little museums in Italy, the Czech Republic, a tiny village in The Netherlands and a suburb in Atlanta. The collections get started by vintage tech fans in part because Apple says it has no interest in creating a museum.
Jewels in Tekserve’s legendary Apple collection
Tekserve — the Mac shop that appeared in Sex and the City whenever columnist Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) ran into problems with her PowerBook — maintained one of those impressive collections.
Among the jewels were a 128K Macintosh signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, a NeXTcube, and an Apple Lisa.
MacPaw’s museum houses 70 pieces, including the 40 items it got from Tekserve. The other items include every generation of iPhone, a collection of “Think Different” posters and swag bags from past Worldwide Developers Conferences.
MacPaw hopes to add to the collection, although because it is a corporate headquarters, it is not exactly a public museum.
In case you are wondering about the MacPaw name, Kosovan named the company at a time when the Mac operating systems bore big cat names, like Cheetah, Tiger, Leopard and Lion. MacPaw is also home to a couple of shop cats, one of which you can see as it greets the Tekserve collection in the video below.