Who Has Apples at Work? In Many Cases, It’s the Bosses

Hyoung Chang/The Denver PostCapt. Joe Burns, United’s managing director of technology and flight tests, uses an iPad instead of a printed manual. The airline began using iPads in August.

Apple products are catching on inside businesses, but who exactly is using them there?

Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research, decided to find out recently by surveying nearly 10,000 information workers in 17 countries to help paint a profile of the typical person who uses an iPad, iPhone or Macintosh for work. The study was partly inspired by what Mr. Gillett called the “air travel and Starbucks effect” — a sense he got, while spying more and more Apple icons among road warriors and $4 latte-drinkers, that usage of the company’s products skewed toward more affluent workers.

Sure enough, the study, which Forrester plans to release Thursday, says that 43 percent of people making over $150,000 a year use an iPhone, iPad or Mac for work, making them far more likely than any other group to use an Apple product. In comparison, 27 percent of people earning $100,000 to $149,999 said they use an Apple product for work, while 23 percent of people making $50,000 to $99,999 a year and 19 percent of earners below $50,000 said the same.

Similarly, 41 percent of the respondents who identified themselves as “directors” at their companies said they used an Apple product for work. For self-identified “managers” and “workers,” the figures were 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

It’s important to keep in mind that there are a lot more worker bees in the world making $50,000 or less than there are directors making $150,000 or more. So that smaller percentage of lower compensated employees using Apple products still represents a much, much bigger pool of customers for Apple.

In Forrester’s survey, for example, only about 200 respondents made over $150,000 a year, while there were 6,800 making $50,000 or less. Translation: There were nearly 1,300 Apple users in the low-earner category, and only 87 in the high-earner category, even though, as a group, the high-earners were more likely to use Apple devices.

In total, 21 percent of Forrester’s respondents said they use one Apple device or more for work.

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. Mr. Gillett says he believes the portion of people in lower-earning categories using Apple products will only increase over time.

“Someone influential walks into I.T. and says, ‘Hey, you gotta make e-mail work on my iPad,’ ” he said. “At some point, it gets very hard for I.T. to say, ‘No, you can’t have it.’ “

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