Happy 40th birthday, Apple. Welcome to middle age

Apple won't be blowing its billions on Porsches (well, except for the rumors it's working on a self-driving car), but the birthday seems fitting for a company in a more, shall we call it, mature stage of life. Apple's no longer the brash, hippie company that introduced the Macintosh computer in 1984 as part of its mission to create "bicycles for the mind." And it isn't the struggling organization that was on the verge of bankruptcy when Steve Jobs returned to run it in 1997 and urged people to "Think Different." It's not even the Apple of the early 2000s, when it introduced one blockbuster product after another -- the iPod, iTunes store, iPhone, iPad and even the Apple retail store. The Apple of today is a grown-up company with hundreds of millions of customers actively using more than a billion of its products.