Main image of article Apple Is Infiltrating Business at All Levels
Apple had good news over the last few days, and now comes even more good news: 20 percent of global information workers use Apple products, an all-time high. That’s the big finding in a new Forrester Research report called Apple Infiltrates The Enterprise, and a Forrester blog post has more of the stats: Almost half of enterprises (1,000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52 percent increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.
  • In companies that issue Macs, 7 percent of all computers issued are Macs.
  • Managers and execs are more than twice as likely to use Apple products.
  • Younger info workers are twice as likely to use Apple products as older ones.
  • Higher income workers are more likely to use Apple products.
  • The use of Apple products is pretty strong down the income scale. Most of the sample of 10,000 global info workers earn less than $50,000, but the adoption rate of Apple products is almost 17 percent even in the bottom quartile of workers who make less than $12,000 per year.
  • Info workers in countries outside North America and Europe are more likely to use Apple products for work.
As The New York Times notes:
It’s interesting to note how this income breakdown squares with the conventional narrative of how Apple products are making their way into offices, which was long hostile territory to anything but Windows PCs. The perception is that Apple is benefiting from the so-called trend of “consumerization,” in which hidebound information technology departments are being forced to adapt to an avalanche of consumer technologies like mobile phones, tablets and social media by workers who effectively sneak them into the workplace. That trend is real, but it appears that top decision makers inside big companies are often doing the sneaking, not just rank-and-file employees. That may be partly because highly compensated executives simply have more money to spend on Apple products. It could also be that they have more leverage to persuade their information technology departments to support Apple products.
The bottom line: Apple is really hitting on all cylinders these days.