(Image source: Today’s iPhone)

BY EVAN THOMAS

ANCHOR JIM FLINK

Apple stock hit another all-time high this week. Stock was up 3% on Thursday morning, and that was enough to put Apple’s market cap at $456 billion -- worth more than Google and Microsoft, combined.

Apple Insider reports -- Apple passed Exxon for most valuable company by market cap back in August of last year. It has since grown that lead to about $50bn, and it’s still going.

Bespoke Investment Group reports on Seeking Alpha, Apple’s so big, when it bumps just a couple of points it leaves entire swaths of the stock market in the dust.

“...just today AAPL has seen its market cap rise by more than $12 billion. That is greater than the market cap of every company in the S&P 400 Mid Cap Index, and more than the market cap of half the members of the S&P 500!”

An analyst on CNBC suggests investors weren’t expecting Apple’s value to simply keep climbing.

“You’re having a chase, post-earnings, where the stock got up to $455. Folks kind of sat back, waited, said ‘okay, let’s see what happens. Let’s see if we get a pullback.’ You never get the pullback, and this is the chase now. Everyone’s chasing it higher.”

So what exactly is chasing the numbers skyward right now?
Fortune attributes the jump to speculation making the rounds Thursday that Apple was prepping the iPad 3 for a March release. It put together a list of some other milestones, to give Apple’s numbers some context.

Apple is worth more than the GDP of Sweden, worth more than all the gold in the Federal Reserve, and worth about two and a half Apollo space programs.

And thanks to the Internet, there’s now a blog dedicated to tracking other big businesses Apple has passed by. You guessed it – Things Apple is Worth More Than – on Tumblr.

For instance, Apple’s worth more than the entire U.S. clothing industry, and more than the world’s illegal drug industry. If it wanted to, Apple could buy up all the residential property in Atlanta, Georgia and still have cash in the bank.

Electronista says there’s a reason Apple is growing this way.

“Most of Apple's continuous rise in share can be owed to both its nature as a hardware company, which gives it higher revenues and more perceived worth, as well as a continual growth that has usually been well-managed as it enters new categories.”

The iPad 3 isn’t a new category, but Apple Insider says analysts on Wall Street are continuing to bump their estimates anyway.