At $500 Billion, Apple Is Worth as Much as Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Honda, Ford, Nissan, and GM Combined

With the revenue and profit generating success of its iOS products, Apple's market value has passed half a trillion dollars in after hours trading. This is truly astonishing. Look at just a few of these comparisons:

• Car companies used to be the pillar of national economies. Now, Apple is worth as much as Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Honda, Ford, Nissan, GM, Renault, Peugeot, Renault, and Tesla combined. 
  
• Or take media. If you add up Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Viacom, Time Warner, Time Warner Cable, CBS, Liberty Global, Dish Network, Charter, and Cablevision, you can only get to $350 billion of market capitalization. 
  
• Apple is worth more than Google ($200 billion) and Microsoft ($267 billion) combined.
• Apple is worth 16 times more than Dell ($31 billion) and almost 6 times as much as HP ($51 billion).
• Apple makes more profit in two weeks than AOL's entire market cap.
  
• Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Adobe, HP, Dell, and Lenovo are worth almost $600 billion to Apple's $500 billion.  

With a run like this, it's difficult to do much more than wait and watch. It's hard to compare their success with any technology company, including Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Image: Google.