Archive for September 21, 2026

Monday, September 21, 2026

Shop Different

HarperCollins (Amazon):

When Steve Jobs hired Ron Johnson to create the Apple Store in 2000, conventional wisdom said that the internet would put stores out of business. By the time he left Apple in 2011, Johnson and his team had created the most respected and profitable retail stores in the world. And even then, skeptics were still predicting the death of physical retail.

In Shop Different, Johnson reveals how it happened: how he earned Jobs’s trust, how they developed a vision for a store that would win not by selling but by serving, and how he convinced Jobs that the store’s service philosophy should be rooted in something as intangible as love. Johnson then gives readers a new look at Apple’s ascent to the most valuable company in the world; offers an inspiring vision for a future in which retailers win on connection, service, and experience; and shares an honest look at what leads to success—and what can follow.

I enjoyed this interview that Jeff Benjamin and Fernando Silva did with Ron Johnson.

Previously:

Airmail 26.037

Today, Apple sent me an e-mail about the Airmail Mac e-mail client:

Thank you for subscribing to Airmail Pro Yearly. We wanted to let you know about an upcoming change to this subscription.

The developer, Bloop S.R.L, is raising the price of this subscription from $9.99 per year to $49.99 per year.

This is a big increase in percentage terms, but the new price is actually not out of line with subscriptions for other e-mail clients these days. There remains a free version that supports a single mail account.

They recently added an MCP:

Airmail now connects to AI assistants like Claude, Codex, and other compatible chatbots — so you can manage your email just by asking, in plain language.

Ask your assistant to find messages, summarize long threads, draft replies, tidy up your inbox, and organize folders. Airmail stays in control: everything runs on your Mac, and you decide what the assistant is allowed to do.

Most relevant to recent discussions here: does Airmail access Exchange accounts via the moribund EWS or the newer Graph API? They told me that it does not currently support Graph but that they will add that in a future update.

Previously: