Apple Computer is 30 years old on April 1. What follows, before you turn the page, is not for geeks, it’s for aesthetes. Apple, with its laptops and iPods, is certainly, from one perspective, a geek thing; but, from another, much more interesting perspective, it’s an art thing, the story of how, even in our time, art and art alone can make, break, remake and, above all, express a contemporary cultural reality.

Two films make the point. The most recent is the 94-minute address to the 2006 Macworld Conference, in San Francisco, by Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple.

You can find it at www.apple.com. The second is the 45-second TV ad made by Ridley Scott in 1984 to announce the launch of the Macintosh computer. It was screened once, during the Super Bowl, and it is widely and justifiably regarded as the greatest television ad ever made. It can be found on any number of internet sites.

The Jobs address should really be watched as a feature film; it is just the right length, and is replete with narrative, character, drama and revelation. Jobs annually uses this event to announce new corporate triumphs and new products. He is never speculative. Apple does not believe in deferred gratification; almost everything Jobs announces is in the shops as he speaks, and he never trails the future. The event is a prayer meeting, full of gasps and cries of affirmation from the audience of believers. The preacher’s message is: join us and be free.

Ridley Scott’s advert proposed the same hot gospel. In some futuristic hell, robotic serfs gaze at a giant screen showing the crazed rantings of what is plainly George Orwell’s Big Brother. An athletically clad girl races in. She is pursued by helmeted goons and she carries a sledgehammer. With a cry, she hurls the hammer at the screen. It explodes. The serfs gaze on, bewildered and open-mouthed, as a voice tells us that, thanks to the Apple Mac, 1984 will not be like “1984”. Join us and be free.

Whatever its share price, Apple identifies itself not as just another company, but as a cause. Indeed, it is a cause in opposition to other companies. Its recent switch to Intel chips — those used in most other computers — was again advertised as a liberation, this time for the chip itself. Previously it had been “trapped inside PCs doing dull little tasks”; in an Apple, it can do “so much more”.

The cause is highly consistent over time; it is the liberation from imprisonment in dullness and uniformity. But the cause, as in some fable, has been betrayed by false prophets. Apple failed to prevent the dominance of first IBM, then Microsoft, in the computer market and, in disarray, slumped in the early 1990s towards what seemed to be a certain demise. Its computers were dreadful. (I abandoned them at the time; I have returned now. A twitch on the thread brought me back to the faith.) Then it bounced back, first, on the back of some astonishing product design, then on the huge success of the iPod. Just as every vacuum cleaner was once really a Hoover, so now every music player is really an iPod.

The slump was caused by the departure of Jobs, who is now also head of the cartoon film company Pixar, and the revival by his return. So, whatever the public cause of Apple may be, its private cause is Jobs. Considered as a work of art, Apple is the product of two artists.

The second is the designer Jonathan Ive, but the first is Jobs. Considered in terms of a religion, Jobs is God, Ive his son.

So, first, Jobs. He started the company in his bedroom with Steve Wozniak, who was the real computer brain. The liberation theology sprang from their joint and essentially 1960s hippie conviction that computers should be for the people. In the 1950s, IBM executives had seriously believed that the world needed only half a dozen mainframe computers. The garage and bedroom hobbyists rebelled and, in the form of Jobs and “Woz”, succeeded in proving their point.

What followed is now a hoary old story, but the key aesthetic point that is usually missed is Jobs’s perfectionism. Unlike most businessmen, he wanted to produce not just a saleable product, but a perfect one. At the technical level, this meant he wanted to make both hardware and software in one perfect, integrated package. Microsoft took the financially saner route of making the software and leaving the hardware to others.

Aesthetically, this was a way of maintaining creative control. Apple has always gone to extraordinary lengths to make its systems beautiful and, when asked what he most disliked about Microsoft, Jobs answered, with measured disdain: “They have no taste.” The slightly sinister, autocratic side of this is the way this aesthetic control freakery demands that you play the game according to Jobs’s rules. Apple systems are much more opaque than Microsoft’s, going to greater lengths to conceal the machine’s inner workings. The smiling face is a mask; but then all art is fiction.

Having left in 1985, Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and unleashed his corporate son, Ive. Apple’s software was in a mess and its market share almost invisible. So Jobs went for taste, and Ive produced a series of extraordinary, wildly postmodern machines. With their translucent, candy-coloured plastics and, in the case of the desktops, large, inviting handles, they had an almost overpowering tactile quality. Ive’s style may have now resorted to an extremely refined modernism, but this tactile quality remains. Go to any one of the extravagant Apple temples — the word “stores” falls laughably short of the actual experience — and you will see people (sometimes me) not just using the machines, but stroking them.