Apple has become one of the world’s most valuable companies because of its products: the Mac, the iPad, the Apple Watch and most especially the iPhone. But the company’s product sales have been aided over the past 25 years by the presence of its iconic brand in more than 500 retail stores scattered across 27 countries and regions. Anyone who has ducked into an Apple store for a new iPhone or toted a broken Mac through the mall for a repair appointment at the Genius Bar has experienced what Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson built.

In “Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius,” Mr. Johnson details the remarkable story of how, in 1999, Jobs recruited him from Target to join Apple as head of retail and launch perhaps the biggest long shot of Jobs’s entire tenure as chief executive. At a time when computer stores were a moribund category and Apple’s brand was near its lowest ebb, the two men concocted a daring strategy: find some way to connect with the millions of consumers who had no interest in or understanding of Apple’s products.

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Jason Snell is a journalist, podcaster, and Jeopardy! contestant. The editor-in-chief of Macworld for 17 years, he currently runs the Apple-focused website Six Colors and appears regularly on several podcasts, including MacBreak Weekly and Upgrade. His latest podcast, Designed in California, details the 50-year history of Apple over 50 episodes.

We talked to Snell about some of his favorite apps for streamlining his podcasting and writing workflows.

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My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.

Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates—Bill Gates, of all people!—to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.

The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had been folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.

1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.

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The last two years at WWDC, Apple has felt like it’s been in a hurry. In 2024, in a hurry to catch the AI wave before it entirely passed them by. (They didn’t catch that wave—they wiped out, lost their surfboard, and may have been partially gnawed on by a shark.) Then last year it felt like it was trying to cover up its embarrassment about AI failures by rushing out a new design scheme that felt ill conceived, especially when it came to the Mac.

This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC 2026, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick—but not to hurry.

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