A great decade for Apple (AAPL)

This morning, while reading the newspaper (ok, my RSS feeds via Feedly, newspaper is so, you know… dirty), I wound up looking at Apple's stock price. It's at $213.69 per share as I type this. If you're a long time Apple watcher, this is astonishing. It's been near here before mind you, but that was before the recession.

I remembered hearing that Apple's market cap ($192.64B) was close to that of Google ($198.24B) but after some investigation I found something even more interesting. How does Apple's market cap compare to that of other leading companies – the companies that have major mindshare?

Take Dell for example, whose market cap is about $28.53B. Or Hewlett Packard at $123.72B, and Acer at US$8B. Throw in Ford (yes, that Ford) at $33.6B and General Motors at $3.06B. These are all companies that just about every American recognizes as huge companies.

But what if you add them all up? You get a combined market cap that equals (+/- $1B) Apple's current market cap.