These companies were not in bondage with each other. Wall Street trading isn’t like putting coins in a pair of coffee shop tip jars labeled “Chappell Rhone” and “Taylor Swift.” However, time makes it difficult to ignore the symbolic power of this milestone.
After all, Apple is in the midst of a predictable stretch — well, on the verge of releasing a lot of iPhones, including reportedly a long-awaited foldable iPhone that, if the new leaked information is accurate, lives up to or slightly exceeds years of hype.
Are you looking for a surprise from Apple? 2026 can’t be your year. But might I get you interested in Apple’s updated smart home hub, called the HomePad, or maybe the AirTag 2?
Meanwhile, what has Alphabet been up to lately? For what it’s worth, OpenAI unexpectedly outpaced OpenAI in the frontier AI model race. And on the transportation front, Alphabet earned a lot of press by filling San Francisco with inefficient Waymo robotaxis. Hey, no publicity is bad publicity.
My intention is not to create a dichotomy where Apple looks cool and Alphabet/Google looks scary—tech companies of that size All Scary from a certain point of view. But this is a business environment where Apple, the company famous for creating familiar physical objects for which people exchange money (often a lot of money), feels even more of an underdog than Google, the company currently famous for investing in speculative and risky new technology about which the public, broadly speaking, is not excited.
It’s no surprise that investors are favoring the latter over the former, but that’s not comfortable either.
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