Apple’s first forty years were not just forty years in a very successful company’s life. They were a unique time—one that can likely never be repeated. Photograph by Michael L Abramson / Getty

When I realized that Apple would be turning forty this week—the company was founded on April 1, 1976—I suddenly felt old. I’m thirty-six, a few years younger than Apple, but I’ve followed the company my whole life, and, on some level, I’ve associated its progress with my own. During Apple’s education-centered early days, I was a kid in school; my adolescence coincided with its awkward, post-Jobs meltdown, when it seemed not to know itself; and I came into my own as an adult during its more focussed, mature, and minimalist renaissance. Apple and I are now entering middle age; I suspect we’re both wondering how to stay young.

I’ve always been fascinated by Apple, in other words, not just as a business but as a story. But the story of Apple isn’t simple—and it’s not just about technology. The more time you spend thinking about the company, the stranger it becomes.

The most obviously unusual thing about Apple is that it’s a technology company whose fortunes have been shaped by our ideas about taste—a quality that Americans have always been ambivalent about. On the one hand, we admire good taste: we recognize it as a driver of novelty and enjoy sneering at people whose taste is worse than ours. On the other hand, we resent taste: we worry that a preoccupation with taste is élitist, we’re cynical about its circular, arbitrary nature (hemlines go up, then come down), and we hate being told when our taste is bad. Taste is elevating but undemocratic. We allow it to influence certain parts of life (cars, sneakers, houses, haircuts), but we’re suspicious about people who have too much good taste in other areas (wine, cheese, dogs).

Apple’s history starts with the fact that it tried to take on the complexities of taste—and did so from within an industry that is deeply hostile to it. Especially in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the tech sector demanded a utilitarian plainness, an ostentatious unpretentiousness, in its products—values that Apple rejected. Often, Apple’s detractors and fans, while arguing, on some level, about technical details, also ended up arguing about the cultural nuances of taste. For decades, it was common for tech commentators to accuse Apple of frivolity and élitism, and to criticize it for playing “the fashion game”—a coded criticism, because good taste is often seen as feminine, and the world of technology was imagined as a utilitarian, masculine domain. Although the story of Apple’s design success is often presented in purely aesthetic or technological terms, the company’s innovations in that area had political and cultural dimensions, too: they were, among other things, an attempt to pry computer technology out of the hands of a particular group of men. In this sense, Apple did more than just make well-designed products; in its own way, it fought in the culture wars.

Steve Jobs’s story is, similarly, often told in familiar terms that don’t quite capture what really made him interesting. In business books, Jobs is presented as a visionary management guru; in Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s recent film, he’s cast in the stock role of a flawed genius seeking redemption. But what was fascinating about Jobs doesn’t fit into either of those narratives. Jobs was a stylishly dorky Buddhist technophile, an egomaniacal hippie minimalist, a sentimentally mercurial aesthete hard-ass, a Zen perfectionist, an adopted son who denied, but later accepted, the paternity of his daughter. No novelist could have invented Steve Jobs. He was a man who fit into no preëxisting category—and the fact that he was the boss and public face of the world’s most valuable company was, to say the least, unusual. Ultimately, Jobs was captivating as a human being who embodied many common and contradictory attitudes, not just about technology but about work, family, and spiritual life. During his long, sad, semi-public illness, those contradictions became not just fascinating but moving.

Since Jobs’s death, in 2011, Apple, too, has become interesting in ways that exceed its identity as a technology company. Apple is a spectacular American success story, and so it has come to stand in for American enterprise as a whole: watching Tim Cook—a merely exceptional corporate leader—one begins to wonder how long any institution can expect to hold on to greatness. Similarly, Apple’s products are more appealing each year, but our collective addiction to our smartphones has become a source of collective shame: one wonders whether Apple and Jobs have, inadvertently, taught us all a humbling lesson about our relationship to technology.

When Jobs said, in 1990, that the personal computer was like “a bicycle for the mind,” he meant that it might help us think. One of the odd twists in the Apple story is that the company’s most successful computer, the iPhone, has turned out to be a bicycle for the mind in a different way: it helps us glide quickly away from wherever we are into some other mental space. In a recent book called “The Four-Dimensional Human,” the literary scholar Laurence Scott situates today’s smartphone moment within a larger history stretching back to the Edwardian era, when radio was invented. Scott points out that, around that time, writers began to imagine a future when human beings would live not just in the here and now but also, simultaneously, on some other, more abstract plane. (He quotes a description of this “fourth dimension” from Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s 1901 novel “The Inheritors”: “One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than the cathedrals . . . an unrealised, unrealisable infinity of space.”) The smartphone, through its constant connectivity, has made this vision a reality. We’re all where we are—and also, at the same time, somewhere else. Many of us have been four-dimensional beings only since 2007, when the first iPhone arrived. We don’t know how to think about our new condition just yet.

Apple’s first forty years, in short, were not just forty years in a very successful company’s life. They were a unique time. Transformative technologies were invented, and their place in society was contested and defined. A spectacularly unique person led those efforts. And—arguably—a threshold in human affairs was crossed, as many of us began to live four-dimensional lives. I imagine that Apple will continue to create excellent products for many years to come. But I doubt that the strange, world-altering story of Apple can be repeated, by Apple or any other company. History like this happens only once.