Ron Johnson & buying iPhones in Apple Stores on the AppleInsider Podcast

William Gallagher (0:04)

Hello, welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. I'm William Gallagher. Our sponsors this week are Claude by Anthropic and Origin Technology. In a moment, I'm going to be joined by Wesley Hilliard, but I'm afraid Wesley's going to have to wait a little bit because first of all, we have a special guest. We have Ron Johnson. Now, if you've been around Apple for a time, you'll know the name. But if you've ever been in an Apple store, any Apple store, anywhere in the world, you know what he did. I got to talk to him for Apple Insider just as his book about how he and Steve Jobs together created the Apple Store. Actually, I'll tell you, I would like, if you don't mind, to just forget everything you've done and leap forward to write now because just as your book is coming out, Apple has had this massive launch, but we're not going to have queues outside Apple Stores anymore.

Do you think we're missing out on something now? Have we lost something?

Ron Johnson (1:02)

Well, I do. I do think when the duo comes out, the stores will be as busy as they've been in years. Because it's been since 2015, really when Apple Watch was announced, that you had a dramatically different form factor for people to check out. But everyone uses an iPhone, and whether you're going to buy this new duo or not, you're going to want to check it out, and the stores will be packed. I do think one of the mistakes, Apple's done such a fabulous job since I left, but I loved lines.

Apple got to a point where they just didn't like the idea of having lines outside, but customers chose to line up. They didn't have to. The people in line, that was an event for them. We used to see families gather outside, and fathers and sons, and grandparents, and grandsons, and they would stay overnight, and we'd bring them water, and it was a beautiful thing. I thought those days, and the employees loved it. It got energy. I just thought it was a beautiful thing, and Apple's decided that they don't want that as much anymore, but who knows?

William Gallagher (2:22)

I'd actually forgotten the water. Yes.

Ron Johnson (2:25)

We had umbrellas and water, and whatever it took. If it was raining, we had umbrellas. If it was sunny and hot, we had umbrellas. I remember lying at our Ginza store in Tokyo, went 10 subway stations long in a typhoon warning. And those were the days.

William Gallagher (2:47)

I know from your book that you saw queues and things like that. Did you ever actually join the line to see what it was like?

Ron Johnson (2:55)

Oh, I would walk. I loved to go out in the lines. So every day when I was at an opening, I would go out and talk to people in the line, just to get to know them, to understand why they came. And typically, right before the launch, I just walked the line with a couple of other employees to see how long it was, and to thank people for coming. And I'll never forget, we opened the store. I was with Steve Kano, who was at Apple for a long time, a great leader, and we were at Shibuya in Tokyo.

And we went out. It was a super hot summer day. We walked the line. And then we realized we couldn't get back in time for the opening. So we had to run back. By the time I got there, I was sweating, you know, from just being outside in the warm heat.

But those were moments that you never forget. You know, you never forget.

William Gallagher (3:47)

Victim of your own success, though.

Actually, let's go back right to when it all began. Because you talk a lot in the book about how Apple reached out to you, Steve Jobs recruiter and things like that. But as a retail man at that moment, did it seem sensible to you that Apple would want stores?

Ron Johnson (4:13)

Well, I understood why Apple would want stores. Apple had spent 25 years. In 2000, when I joined Apple, Apple had been a company for 25 years. The perspective was that Microsoft had won. Microsoft did 95 percent market share. Arguably, Apple had beautiful products and great software, and they were a little higher priced than the PCs. But the market share was way too low.

If you looked at the go-to-market strategy where you could buy Macs, well, like in the US, you couldn't buy them at Best Buy or Circuit City. They didn't carry the Mac, and they are the two most popular consumer electronic stores. If Apple is going to win, Steve concluded that it had to take the experience directly to the customer, so it had to do its own stores.