Tuesday’s Apple Rumors: Apple Becomes America’s Most Valuable Company

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tdp2664 InvestorPlace Here are your daily Apple news items and rumors for Tuesday: Apple Over Exxon: Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) is officially the most valuable company in the U.S. in market value. Its market capitalization rose past Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM ) just after 2 p.m. Tuesday. The oil giant was valued just below $337 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, while Apple was valued above $338 billion on the Nasdaq. Steve Jobs and Apple COO Tim Cook reportedly dove into a pile of money and had what witnesses described as a “snowball fight but with iPads” later that day. On Wednesday, readers can expect Steve Jobs to buy Uruguay, Europa (formerly Jupiter’s moon) and — if rumors out of Chinese trade papers are to be believed — all of Europe. All Your PC Customers Are Belong to Us: A Tuesday report from research firm Gartner (via Apple Insider ) is predicting Apple’s Mac computers are going to account for 4.5% of all PC sales in 2011 , impressive gains for a company that was responsible for just more than 3% of all personal computer sales in 2008. More impressive, however, is that Apple is expected to nearly match that growth by 2015, with Macs comprising 5.2% of all PC sales, by Gartner’s calculations. International markets will fuel the Mac between now and then, with growth markets like China leading the charge. Some things never change, though; Gartner expects Microsoft ‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT ) Windows 7 operating system and machines that run them to represent 42% of all PC sales by the end of 2011, an overwhelming majority. War on the iPad Goes Over There: Hewlett-Packard (NASDAQ: HPQ ), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL ), Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM ), Motorola (NYSE: MMI ) and many others have drained the coffers of their R&D departments to create and release tablet PCs to take down Apple’s unstoppable force, the iPad. They’ve all failed. At least, that is, in the United States. According to a Tuesday Reuters report, competitors in the tablet war have a better chance of taking on Apple on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Research firm Forrester believes Apple’s smaller retail presence in Europe — the company operates just 52 stores in the region compared to 238 in the U.S. — will give other tablet manufacturers a fighting chance. It’s a slim chance, though. The report said 70% of all consumer tablets sold in Europe will be iPads, less than the 80% in the U.S. But those competitors have to start somewhere. As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at