Apple Just Became Less Valuable Than Alphabet/Google and the Timing Is Unsettling

Alphabet’s market capitalization was $3.88 trillion at the close of trading on Wednesday—just a tiny bit higher than Apple’s $3.84 trillion. According to CNBC, it was the first time this happened since 2019.

These companies were not in a steel cage with one another. Wall Street trading is not like dropping coins in a pair of coffee shop tip jars labeled “Chappell Roan” and “Taylor Swift.” Nonetheless, the timing makes it hard not to ignore the symbolic power of this milestone.

After all, Apple is in the middle of a predictable stretch—on the verge of, well, releasing a lot of iPhones, including, reportedly, a long-awaited foldable iPhone that, if the newly leaked information is accurate, meets or slightly exceeds years of hype. 

Looking for surprises from Apple? 2026 may not be your year. But may I interest you in Apple’s updated smart home hub called a HomePad, or perhaps the AirTag 2?

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

I don’t mean to create a dichotomy where Apple sounds wholesome and Alphabet/Google sounds scary—tech companies this size are all scary from a certain perspective. But this is a business environment where Apple, the company famous for making familiar physical objects that people exchange money for (often too much money) feels like more of an underdog than Google, the company famous—currently—for investing in speculative and risky new tech that the public, broadly speaking, isn’t stoked about.

It’s no surprise to see investors favoring the latter over the former, but it’s also not comforting.