Jason Snell
On Upgrade
“I really, really believe that the unstated thing about Apple's revival is the retail stores. That if you think back, Apple's brand was not even bad. It was irrelevant in that era because of the rise of Windows PCs.”
Upgrade · October 2026
Snell is discussing a book by Ron Johnson, who built the Apple Stores. He argues that with the exact same products, Apple would not have rebuilt its brand as well without a place where curious people could walk in and see them.
Transcript
Revive. He wants to run the show and he wants to revive maybe what he in his heart felt was like a classic department store brand of the 20th century. And I think that that's kind of the challenge there is that he had actually done the thing, which was make the Apple store. And now he's trying to kind of like do this thing that's the past now and is fading away. And they were very resistant to him, but he admits that it was kind of like a bad situation. And yeah, I don't know. Also, it's all intertwined with Steve Jobs dying because like he literally is told. Steve Jobs says, I'm dying. And can you stay until I'm gone? Don't leave now. Can you stay as long as I'm still here? And Ron Johnson, who's going to be the CEO of JCPenney, is like, yes, it stays for six months. So it's very emotional. He talks about saying goodbye to Steve on the day before he died. There's a lot of that in there too. But yeah, he owns the JCPenney stuff. And, you know, and yet I walked away from it sort of thinking like it was kind of in his nature. He kind of had to try. But also, he was, I think, chasing. This is me. I think chasing an ideal that was already gone, already had been made obsolete. But he was so idealistic about retail and about department stores and all that that he really wanted to give it a go. And he had enough cachet because of the Apple stores to take on that role. And it just didn't.
That's like maybe there's even an argument that the work he did at the Apple Store is part of the reasons that department stores were going away. People were creating new experiences that possibly a department store anymore. Like it was a sign of the times and that something like JCPenney was not going to take off again, maybe.
Also struck by how Ron Johnson, he defined a lot of, at least according to the book, but I believe him, defined a lot of what the Apple store was in a way that Steve Jobs was maybe not thinking big enough, which is an interesting thing to say about Steve Jobs because you always think he thinks big, but I think maybe he didn't think big enough. Like Ron Johnson says, this will be your brand. He was like, I don't want to be in shopping malls. And he's like, do you want to reach people who don't know anything about Apple? That's where they are. And in 2000, that is where they were. And, you know, saying the size of the store, he's like, the store needs to be big. It's a representation of your brand. Your brand is, is your brand big, Steve? And Steve's like, well, yeah, our brand is big. Is your brand bigger than the gap? Well, yeah, it is. Well, then your stores need to be bigger than the gap, was his argument. And he sort of had to drag Steve there a little bit. But I believe, I think I mentioned this in the review, but like I really, really believe that the unstated thing about Apple's revival is the retail stores. That if you think back, Apple's brand was not even bad. It was irrelevant in that era because of the rise of Windows PCs. The Mac was this niche product. The iPod wasn't out yet. And when it came out, it wasn't on Windows for a couple of years. But at least people who are curious could go into an Apple store and see it. And by having that retail presence, by having the Apple brand be reachable by people, it allowed them to sell Macs at iPods and ultimately iPhones. And I think even with the exact same product set that they had, I don't think Apple would have been as successful in rehabbing its brand if they weren't present initially American retail stores in the retail environment and then ultimately worldwide. I think it was a huge part. And Steve Jobs cared a lot about the Apple brand, but you could sort of see that from Ron Johnson's perspective, he wasn't thinking clearly about what retail meant for the Apple brand. And then, and that's part of the journey they take together.
Yeah. Yeah. And you can kind of see why, because it's not like he had something to compare it to. Like there wasn't a consumer technology company that was owning and operating their own branded store experience. The
computer stores in that era were either Circuit City or Comp USA, where there was a store within a store for Apple, but it was kind of dusty and nothing. Or they were like computer stores and they were very dusty and not interesting. And that's one of the realizations there. Is Ron Johnson's like, we want people coming into these stores and not just once every three years, right? We want them coming in all the time. Whenever
they're at the mall,
More from Upgrade
