It’s Microsoft’s Time to Shine – Get Your Hands on Apple’s Competition

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Tech News: Microsoft Surpasses Apple in Market Cap

Apple has been the most valuable publicly traded company since 2011 when it usurped the oil giant Exxon Mobile, but Cupertino might be in for a shock as Microsoft has recently surpassed them in market cap. After chasing Apple’s lead for over a decade, the tech giant’s market cap crossed the $3 trillion mark twice this month, currently sitting at 3.01 trillion compared to Apple’s 2.9 trillion.

Satya Nadela’s 10 Year Anniversary as CEO

Satya Nadela is celebrating his 10-year anniversary as CEO of Microsoft, and for good reason. The milestone is being treated by the tech media as an opportunity to ask how Nadela was able to stay ahead. A big part of the answer is continual investment into cloud infrastructure and having quick feet to sidestep scandals and controversies that have plagued other tech giants.

Investment in AI

Microsoft has heavily invested in AI, while Apple has taken a slower approach. However, Apple has announced that they will reveal some big AI news later this year. Microsoft, on the other hand, recently announced an AI-infused partnership with Semaphore, a news website founded by veterans of BuzzFeed News, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Media Group in 2022. This partnership will see Semaphore journalists using AI tools to search news sources across multiple languages and write articles themselves.

Demand for RTX 490 GPUs Drives Prices Up

The demand for RTX 490 GPUs in China is driving up prices in other Asian countries. Despite Nvidia releasing the Chinese-exclusive 490D variant to comply with US export regulations, a black market has grown for the original full-fat non-D GPUs. Retailers in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam have stopped selling the graphics cards individually and are putting them inside pre-built systems to deter scalpers.

Vision Pro Analysis

The Vision Pro has now been thoroughly analyzed by Reddit users, with some noting a small field of view and reflections in the lenses. Users have discovered that using the headset without its light seal can increase the field of view by 15 degrees, but at the expense of potentially damaging the display.

Quick Bits

Samsung’s head of customer experience claimed there is no such thing as a real picture, defending the generative edit feature on the Samsung Galaxy. An AI heist cost a multinational company $25 million, using deep fake technology to deceive employees. Japan’s Slim Moonlander faces challenges surviving the lunar night, and a YouTuber built a functioning 16-bit CPU inside Microsoft Excel.

Stay tuned for more tech news on Wednesday!


24 COMMENTS

  1. Apple, under Jobs, never wanted to be Number 1, they wanted to be Number 2. Cook was in agreement. Regardless, Cook needs to go, he is not an innovator, he is a great 2IC. He is a better version of the Balmer era at MS, but still he needs to go.

  2. I don't think it would be hard for any big tech company to catch up in AI progress fairly quickly. We've seen what the open source community has been able to do in a very short time with much less resources. Lots of groundbreaking progress in AI is open to the public (e.g. in papers) and not hidden in some big corporate secret bunker. The idea that "big leads" transfer to big time periods needed to catch up is imo not really adequate in this field. AI capabilities, model quality etc. shouldn't be a big deal.
    However, the question is how well it is included in your ecosystem. That's where I see the true lead Microsoft has. They've invested lots of money, intelligence and manpower to create an incredible ecosystem in the productivity & cloud sector. I don't see apple recreating that so easily.

  3. Hey, 16 colors (EGA) used to be an awesome upgrade…from 4 colors (CGA), or monochrome (2 colors, black + 1). For those of you too young to remember, that makes 256 colors (VGA). Then we moved to the 16M colors of RGB.