Here are your daily Apple news items and rumors for Tuesday:
Apple Over Exxon: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is officially the most valuable company in the U.S. in market value. Its market capitalization rose past Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) just after 2 p.m. Tuesday. The oil giant was valued just below $337 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, while Apple was valued above $338 billion on the Nasdaq. Steve Jobs and Apple COO Tim Cook reportedly dove into a pile of money and had what witnesses described as a “snowball fight but with iPads” later that day. On Wednesday, readers can expect Steve Jobs to buy Uruguay, Europa (formerly Jupiter’s moon) and — if rumors out of Chinese trade papers are to be believed — all of Europe.
All Your PC Customers Are Belong to Us: A Tuesday report from research firm Gartner (via Apple Insider) is predicting Apple’s Mac computers are going to account for 4.5% of all PC sales in 2011, impressive gains for a company that was responsible for just more than 3% of all personal computer sales in 2008. More impressive, however, is that Apple is expected to nearly match that growth by 2015, with Macs comprising 5.2% of all PC sales, by Gartner’s calculations. International markets will fuel the Mac between now and then, with growth markets like China leading the charge. Some things never change, though; Gartner expects Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows 7 operating system and machines that run them to represent 42% of all PC sales by the end of 2011, an overwhelming majority.
War on the iPad Goes Over There: Hewlett-Packard (NASDAQ:HPQ), Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM), Motorola (NYSE:MMI) and many others have drained the coffers of their R&D departments to create and release tablet PCs to take down Apple’s unstoppable force, the iPad. They’ve all failed. At least, that is, in the United States. According to a Tuesday Reuters report, competitors in the tablet war have a better chance of taking on Apple on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Research firm Forrester believes Apple’s smaller retail presence in Europe — the company operates just 52 stores in the region compared to 238 in the U.S. — will give other tablet manufacturers a fighting chance. It’s a slim chance, though. The report said 70% of all consumer tablets sold in Europe will be iPads, less than the 80% in the U.S. But those competitors have to start somewhere.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
