Apple has become less valuable than Alphabet/Google and the timing is troubling

Alphabet’s market capitalization stood at $3.88 trillion at the close of trading on Wednesday, just slightly more than Apple’s $3.84 trillion. According to CNBCthis was the first time this had happened since 2019.

These companies were not in a steel cage with each other. Trading on Wall Street isn’t like dropping coins into a pair of coffee shop tip jars labeled “Chappell Roan” and “Taylor Swift.” However, the timing makes it difficult not to ignore the symbolic power of this important milestone.

After all, Apple finds itself in the middle of a predictable period – on the verge of… well, take out a lot of iPhonesincluding, it seems, a long-awaited foldable iPhone which, if the recently disclosed information is accurate, meets or slightly exceeds years of hype.

Looking for surprises from Apple? 2026 may not be your year. But can I interest you in Apple’s updated smart home hub called HomePador maybe the AirTag 2?

Meanwhile, what has Alphabet been up to lately? For what it’s worth, unexpectedly, a body slamming OpenAI in the race for frontier AI models. And on the transportation side, Alphabet has gained a lot of press attention in fill San Francisco with disabled Waymo robotaxis. Hey, no publicity is bad publicity.

I don’t want to create a dichotomy where Apple looks healthy and Alphabet/Google looks scary – tech companies of this size are all scary from a certain point of view. But this is a business environment in which Apple, the company famous for making familiar physical objects that people exchange money (often too much money) for, feels more like an underdog than Google, the company famous – currently – for investing in speculative and risky new technologies that the audiencegenerally speaking, is not happy.

It is not surprising to see investors favor the second solution over the first, but it is not reassuring either.