After Jobs, Apple Goes On

If there were any critics of Apple who lambasted that the company would never survive the passing of co-founder and ex-CEO Steve Jobs, they need only to look at the sum of the retail locations Apple has opened within the past several years.

“Right now it’s just business as usual,” Peter, an employee of the Roosevelt Field store in Garden City said Thursday morning just after the doors were opened at 10 a.m. 

Jobs died Wednesday night at the age of 56. Hailed a modern visionary, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and undergone extensive surgeries including a liver transplant.

There were no bouquets of flowers, no tributes of any kind laid in front of the store’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows at the main entrance and no photos of Jobs around the store, save what appeared on the Apple homepage whenever a customer might launch their Internet browser.

Joshua, another Apple Store employee, recalled his first impressions of the company when the Roosevelt Field location first opened in the upper level next to FAO Schwartz.

“I thought it was this quasi-government agency that sold computers to schools,” he said, recalling a key Apple strategy in the early '90s and seeing it transform into a consumer-electronics powerhouse with the introduction of the iPod in 2002.

Garden City resident John Kaiser was coming out of the store Thursday morning carrying a MacBook Pro laptop he had just recovered after it had been stolen, saying that the employees had helped track down his original receipt and given him the name of a company to help recover the information on his hard drive.

“We knew he was sick,” Kaiser said of the Apple co-founder, noting that his family felt a connection due to a cousin of his wife also being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passing away at about the same age as Jobs.

“He left quite a legacy,” Kaiser said.