Chart: Apple tops Microsoft in cash

This would have been almost unimaginable a few years ago, but as Dean Takahashi notes on Venture Beat, the latest quarterly filings from Microsoft and Apple show that the Mac maker now has more cash in the bank than Microsoft does -- a total of $24.5 billion for the Mac/iPhone/iPod maker, compared with $20.7 billion for the Redmond software company.

Microsoft, which has been legendary for keeping huge amounts of cash on hand over the years, has been purposefully reducing its that balance in recent years through share buybacks, dividends and acquisitions. The company started making use of the cash in that way after it resolved many of the antitrust cases that had been hanging over its head as potential liabilities.

Apple, meanwhile, has been going in the other direction, storing cash in large amounts. Apple CEO Steve Jobs addressed the issue on the company's conference call this week, saying it "provides us tremendous stability and the ability to invest our way thorough this downturn," according to AppleInsider. Jobs added: "This is what we did during the last downturn. We increased R&D investments and created some of our best new products and businesses, like the Apple retail stores for one."

Microsoft is "still very cash rich," said Chris Liddell, the company's chief financial officer, during its conference call with analysts yesterday. He added that Microsoft is "certainly not constrained from a capital point of view in buying companies," if they're the right fit and can be integrated smoothly with the rest of the company's operations.