http://9to5mac.com/2011/09/20/apple-is-too-powerful-for-the-dow-jones-industrial-average/One share of Apple's stock will set you back ~$415 right now. Because the Dow Jones bases its average on the price of stocks at 30 core companies, Apple would skew the DJIA too heavily and make it less accurate as a picture of the market at large.
If Apple were factored into the DJIA, it would hold 22% of the entire value of the DJIA... far too much for one company.
Apple is the largest company in the world now and is nearly the size of Microsoft and Google combined.
It's pretty amazing how a company that was on the brink of falling apart in the mid/late 1990s is now the largest company in the world by market value.
I expect it will only get better in the coming months as Apple releases the iPhone 5, revamps its iPod line (likely a significant makeover as iPod sales have fallen), and introduces a rumored entirely new product line.
Apple's Mac line is also rumored to be getting early access to Intel's upcoming Sandy-Bridge E processors which will probably debut with an overdue refresh of its professional workstation class Mac Pro line.
Macs also have exclusive access to Thunderbolt, a joint venture by Apple and Intel that allows you to connect peripherals to your computer with a bi-directional 10GB/s speed. This means you can hook up large external RAID hard drive setups and get the same speed as internal drives would give you.
Thunderbolt will debut on other PCs in early 2012.
In other tech news:
Microsoft has unveiled the first previews to its Windows 8 operating system. They are taking a risk in making Windows 8 a hybrid operating system that will function fully on both PCs and tablet devices. It borrows both from Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7. Perhaps the biggest change in Microsoft's development is that it plans to allow its flagship operating system onto non x86 processor architecture for the first time. Windows 8 will run on tablets or even PCs with the ARM architecture, an somewhat slower, but incredibly power efficient processing architecture that is found in nearly all tablet devices.
It is thought that Apple is also heading in that direction, already having integrated many iOS features into OS X Lion, which came out in July. The merging of the two will likely continue. Where Apple has the upper hand is that it already has successful operating systems for both mobile devices and PCs/Laptops. There have already been rumors for some time now that Apple will be making its Mac OS line compatible with ARM-based processors as Intel has had problems offering the low power chips that Apple wants for its mobile devices. Intel has assuaged Apple, however, in promising that its Ivy Bridge line coming out next year will see major boosts in graphics performance (60%) as well as a huge reduction in power usage, allowing a laptop or tablet device to run 24 hours or up to 10 days on standby from one charge... a massive improvement from current chips.
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