Apple No. 1 in both value and image

Apple Inc., now the world's most valuable company and burnished by the iPhone's success and memorials to Steve Jobs, has displaced Google Inc. as the top company in Harris Interactive's poll of corporate images.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. dropped from fourth to 24th.

Apple earned the highest score in the 13-year history of Harris' survey of U.S. consumers, buoyed by the company's financial success and products like last year's iPhone 4S, said Robert Fronk, the pollster's executive vice president.

Also Monday, Apple stock passed $500 a share for the first time. It was the latest step in a rally that began more than two weeks ago when the company reported staggering sales and profits for the holiday quarter.

The rally has made it 17 percent more valuable, with a market capitalization of $465 billion, than second-place Exxon Mobil.

Apple's rise in the Harris survey came even as corporate America's reputation sank, hurt by sagging views of the financial industry, Harris said Monday.

"After a little positive momentum last year, across the board, we saw the tarnish come back," Fronk said. "Whether it's due to Occupy Wall Street or the bad news in general, the negatives of the banking and financial-services industries are spreading."

Omaha-based Berkshire's slide followed the March resignation of executive David Sokol amid revelations that he had bought shares of a Buffett takeover target. In interviews, respondents also cited the company's ties to Goldman Sachs, the New York-based bank in which Buffett invested $5 billion in 2008.

Johnson & Johnson, the world's second-biggest seller of health-care products, fell to seventh amid a series of product recalls.

Only eight companies were rated as "excellent" in Harris' poll of 17,000 people, half the number in 2011.

Google slipped to second place from first last year. Rounding out the top five were Coca-Cola, Amazon.com and Kraft Foods.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.

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