Apple smashed Wall Street records during its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday and showed that the Tech juggernaut has more dry powder than any company ever to spend on developing new product categories through strategic acquisitions and fixing the few that are broken. With cash totaling $178 billion, expectations of a future windfall for those who are or may do business in the Apple economy is lifting share prices of companies worldwide. The whole Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose by as much as one percent in Wednesday trading. The Technology SPDR added almost 2 percent and came within $1 from wiping out its decline for the year. All because of Apple. NXP Semiconductors , which makes the sensor chip powering Apple Pay, jumped nearly 3 percent on Wednesday. LG Display , in an interesting role as supplier to Apple and its competitor LG Electronics, spiked nearly 2 percent. Read More Apple blowout may only be the beginning: Analysts While momentum from the latest iPhone sales that drove the earnings beat will likely fade in the next few quarters, analysts see momentum in other product categories that will fill investors' and industry players' pockets. "We expect Apple to use its cash to again increase its dividend this year and continue buying back stock, as well as make smaller scale acquisitions that drive ongoing technological advantages such as it has achieved with liquid metal and its fingerprint scanner," said Alex Gauna, senior analyst at JMP Securities, which has a "buy" rating on the stock. Tuesday's earnings report showed that Apple's cash pile rose 15 percent from the previous quarter. If the cash portion of its balance sheet was a public company it would be the 14th-biggest in the S & P 500. Profit in the last quarter was a record-breaking $18 billion. According to Standard & Poor's, Apple alone will account for 7 percent of the benchmark's fourth-quarter earnings. It's just 3.6 percent of its market value. Besides payouts to investors, lots of cash means Apple can enter into deals, possibly to build an ecosystem around the Watch or its floundering Apple TV offering, Rosenblatt Securities' Brian Blair said. Read More Why Apple stock is still cheap: Analyst "I think they (Apple) could use some of the cash for a TV-related deal, but maybe not this year," he said. There "will still be mostly small deals and returning cash to investors this year, I think." The TV hasn't had a refresh in a couple years, and Blair thinks Apple could come out with its own screen in two or three years. After its announcement last September, the Watch will begin shipping in April . "We continue to see (the Watch) proving a meaningful new product contributor, with Apple proving it can lead another new product category with unique competitive advantages and premium positioning that others will find tough to match," said Evercore ISI's Robert Cihra in a post-earnings note. "Most important, we believe Apple may be the one (if not only) company that can make smartwatches stylish and cool." With wearables, Apple could then get into data analytics, health and personalized services, said ABI Research's Nick Spencer. "I think they will be looking to further diversify their products into the home (think TVs and Google 's Nest) and car." Gathering data from all those products will allow Apple to offer even more personalized experiences, he said. Apple acquired Beats Music for $3 billion last year and has recently completed several other deals with smaller tech companies for an unspecified amount. In comparison, Google completed it $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs last January, for a total of more than $4.8 billion in deals in the last year, according to Dealogic data. In its third-quarter earnings report last October, Google said its total cash was $62.16 billion. The comeback story in progress is the Apple Mac. Mac sales grew 14 percent year-over-year to 5.5 million units for a record revenue of $6.9 billion. Shares of Intel, which makes graphics chips for the Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and the iMac, increased on Wednesday even after a much larger part of its business—the plain PC market—felt the brunt of a 9 percent decline in shares of Microsoft on Tuesday. "Bigger picture … we believe that Mac may actually be a bigger enterprise opportunity than iPad," said Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster. He added that the growing success of Apple Pay within the first six months is "impressive relative to the lack of notable success by companies such as PayPal, Google, MCX, Isis (the mobile wallet), and others." Read More First quarter 'even bigger' for Apple in China In a mid-January note , Credit Suisse's Kulbinder Garcha had estimated Apple's net cash would be $143 billion by April 2015 and anticipated "a sizable increase in its cash return program for the next three years through the end of 2017 to over $200 billion." That proposed distribution to investors is about the current market value of Chevron .
