Record sales of Macs, iPods and iPhones pushed Apple into a 14th place showing in Forbes magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest growing tech companies.

That Apple made the list at all is phenomenal given its age – 32 years – and its substantial size. Apple’s annual $33 billion in revenues far exceeded every other company on the list save No. 2 Google, which had 2008 revenue of $21.7 billion.

Each company’s rank is based on its annualized sales growth from the previous five years. Apple’s was 40 percent, Google’s 72 percent. The No. 1 company, Illumina, grew at an eye-popping 110 percent.

A supplemental article on newcomers to the list says Apple “is growing more like a technology start-up than a big company.”

Other companies of interest on the list include No. 23 Akamai (which Apple employs to deliver its digital content over the Internet) and No. 25 Genentech (CEO Arthur Levinson serves on Apple’s board along with Google’s Eric Schmidt).

Microsoft execs looking over the Forbes list may not like what they see. In addition to big rivals Apple and Google, there’s No. 11 Red Hat, which competes with Windows in the enterprise market with an assortment of Linux-based products.

Microsoft could take heart from finding one company on the list that does in fact sell a great deal of Windows software. Unfortunately that company is No. 22 Symantec, which specializes in PC security software like Norton Anti-Virus.