Apple regains 'el numero uno' market-value crown

iPad reveal steals Microsoftian thunder on Office 365 day

Just a few short days ago, Apple slipped from its position as the world's most valuable company when oil giant ExxonMobil passed it in market capitalization. Well, it's back on top.

Apple and Exxon have been tossing the title back and forth for the past few days, but when the market closed on Tuesday, Apple was comfortably ahead with a market cap of over $422bn compared with Exxon's $415bn and change.

Here at The Reg we play no favorites [What the %$#@! are you talking about? —Ed.], so it's only fair that if we informed you when Apple slipped, we should also let you know that it has since regained its crown. Which it now has. For the moment, at least.

Interestingly, Apple's "We're number one (again)!" moment comes on a day when it took some of the starch out of old adversary Microsoft by announcing an enterprise-targeted 128GB iPad, thus eliminating one advantage of the soon-to-be-released 128GB Microsoft Surface Pro and stealing some headline space on Redmond's Office 365 Home Premium announcement day.

In addition, the Microsofties couldn't have been too pleased with Tuesday's reports that a 128GB Microsoft Surface Pro is actually an 83GB Microsoft Surface Pro.

All-in-all, it's been pretty good day for Apple – well, compared with last week's Sturm und Drang, at least – and a day of off-message distractions for Microsoft marketeers.

And, frankly, we don't believe that anybody is losing any sleep over at ExxonMobil, not with oil prices bumping up near $100 per barrel. ®