Whoa.

This past quarter, Apple actually made more money than Microsoft. Not “they had a better profit margin;” I mean they netted more actual dollars by a margin of $5.99 billion to Microsoft’s $5.2 billion. N.B. that Apple also has a higher market capitalization than MSFT — $323.53 billion as of this writing, vs. $215.44 billion for the “giant” from Redmond. (It’s worth noting that MSFT’s revenue for the period ($16.428B) was much lower than Apple’s ($24.67B), which is interesting in two ways: one, MSFT is just plain doing less business than Apple; and two, they’re still making more profit per dollar of revenue.)

This is not the result of Apple being overvalued, either, by traditional metrics — their P/E is well within the normal range for a company like theirs even if you discount how much cash they’re sitting on (nearly $30 billion, which is enough to, say, buy Sony (who once referred to Apple as a boutique firm) or Dell (whose founder once suggested Apple be closed and sold off) outright).

(Yes, Microsoft DOES have about 30% more actual cash, but they’re carrying about that much debt, too — and Apple has none, so it evens out.)

The point of all this: Should well all start rallying around the scrappy underdog from Redmond now?