As my dear, sweet grandmother would say, holy yikes! Have you seen Apple's stock price lately? Everyone knows it's been climbing overall since January of last year after it bottomed out at around 12 the month before. Since then it's been on a rampage, hitting new plateaus with each new big product announcement or analyst upgrade. Recently, after a two-month stint hovering around the 45 area, it leaped up to 54 and held there for a month and a half-- which is fabulous news, but even that didn't prepare us for what happened on Wednesday.

AAPL closed at nearly 60, up over four points-- a 7.78% gain-- to hit a new year high. In fact, according to the Mac Observer, Apple's new stock price represents the highest it's been in over seven years. The interesting thing is, there wasn't any particular event or announcement in the Mac world that spurred the gains; Apple appears to have benefited from the overall boost the tech sector got from Red Hat's IPO. Red Hat is the biggest and most well-known distributor of the free Linux operating system, which continues to gain popularity as an alternative OS-- especially among owners of Intel-based systems who really don't want to use Windows. Anyway, Red Hat's IPO made their stock quadruple in a day, which led all the tech stocks higher.

What we don't get, though, is why Apple's stock gained more-- both percentage-wise and in raw dollar value-- than most other tech stocks. Even Intel and IBM, both of which we believe have hefty investments in Red Hat, didn't see their stock rise as much as AAPL did. One possibility that crosses our minds is this: investors saw that Red Hat, a company distributing an alternative operating system, was rising like crazy; so here's Apple, a company that's well-established, has a great brand name, is on solid financial footing and has sizeable cash reserves, and who's making not just an alternative operating system, but a complete alternative computer, which just happens to be selling incredibly well. That's got to be worth something, right? Anyway, profit-taking's probably going to cause AAPL to fall a bit on Thursday, but it was still exciting to see the upward surge.