I can hear your snarkiness through this comment because we are all in the same industry. However, the average NYT reader probably hadn't seen or heard from Microsoft in a while to know that Azure is a big deal which is who this article was written for. Timely because of the stock price between them and Apple who we read not long ago were on course to be the first trillion dollar company.
That was just the market being overexcited, overvaluing it and artificially pushing it forward in order to make it that "first co. to hit $1T history." It didn't actually deserve/earn it, and immediately has slipped back to where it should have been in the first place (lost $150B in just 2 short months).
This wasn't some anomaly, AAPL stayed above $1T for an entire quarter, at times being above $1.1T and then only slid down recently when the tech market as a whole did. Trying to pretend Apple was never legitimately worth over $1T is ridiculous
