In the late 1990s it was almost an embarrassment to be discovered to be an Apple computer user. Friends looked sympathetic, employers impatient, their IT staff grimly predicting your forced switch to the Windows nemesis, an inevitability as sure as a wet Glasgow summer.

How sweet it is to be among what was described with a sneer as “the Apple cult”. This week the company posted the biggest annual corporate profit in history, £35 billion. Eighteen years after Steve Jobs’ return from the wilderness and the launch of that first Bondi-blue iMac, Apple continues to dominate.

The talk among financial analysts is no longer whether Apple can survive, but if its wild success presages an inevitable slide. Have we reached “peak Apple”? It seems perverse even to ask the question of a company with a market capitalisation approaching £500bn.

Apple’s profitability will plateau. The laws of financial gravity demand it. Where it stands today, Microsoft once stood too. Steve Ballmer – the former chief of Microsoft and a man whose latter career was analogous to the software giant’s many failures – dismissed the iPod and then iPhone as a flash in the pan. “There’s no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” pronounced Ballmer soon after its launch in 2007. He might as well have admitted to turning down the Beatles or telling Lionel Messi he was too small for professional football.

We assumed that the key to Apple’s success lay with Steve Jobs – maverick, visionary, and reputedly a pain in the ass. When Jobs passed on in 2011, the die seemed cast. No more revolutionary product innovations that characterised his approach. Here was a man who had learned, ruthlessly, from his earlier failures.

Jobs’ annual keynotes – carefully-rehearsed showmanship and downright chutzpah – were followed by adoring millions. The iPod, iPhone and iPad created whole new markets. To walk into any cool, minimalist Apple Store – another initiative experts said would never work – is to realise that your cult is now the mainstream.

This clashes with the true cult-member’s vision of how life should be. If Apple is so mainstream, surely it is time to find alternative digital toys, sorry, essential tools of modern life?

Despite Jobs’ death, Apple sales and profits continue to soar. The tablet market has flattened and just about everybody has some form of mobile phone, but the company has brought new products to new markets. It threatens now to disrupt music, film, TV and games.

Chief executive Tim Cook lacks his predecessor’s charisma. Compared to Jobs his public delivery resembles that of a man using English as a second language. But he knows how to run the Cupertino money machine.

I remain a sometimes doubting member of the Apple cult. Unconvinced by the merits of the Apple Watch I may be, but then I still own an Apple Newton “personal assistant” from c.1995, and it never quite delivered on its promise either…