According to Dan Sanborn of Ned Davis Research, the S&P 500 index’s total earnings growth drops from 7.8% year over year with Apple to just 2.7% without.

Meanwhile Barclays Capital has produced a chart — spotlighted Sunday on Business Insider by Joe Weisenthal — showing the earnings growth of the tech sector with and without Apple. What was a gap has become a chasm.

Rather than being the exception, he suggests, Apple may be the rule that defines a new era in business. The company is not there to make up for the deficiencies of the rest of the economy.

Rather, it is the engine of growth for its era, redefining our ideas about marketing and productivity and changing business processes across whole industries, much as GM did in its time and IBM did in its.