Are iPhones considered to be gateway devices to other Apple products? There’s an argument to be made for that but as it stands, it seems that thanks to a recent study conducted by Forrester Research, they have found that Apple products account for about 8% of global business and government spending in 2012, but expects that those numbers should hit 11% come 2015. Interestingly enough, the study did not mention anything about Apple’s iPhone, which like we said have been considered to be the gateway into other Apple products. In fact it was back in 2013 that we reported on Apple’s CEO’s plans of trying to push more iPhone sales at their retail stores.
The reasoning was that if more sales were made in their stores where other Apple products are also available for testing, it might prompt customers to make additional purchases they might not have made if they were just shopping online. This is a sound reasoning because as tempting as hardware specs are, sometimes getting a feel of a product tells you a lot more about it than its spec sheet. The study highlights Cisco Systems’ shift to Apple’s iOS platform by instituting a BYOD policy in 2009, where ultimately Apple’s iOS devices accounted for three quarters of Cisco’s 70,000 registered devices back then.
Naturally Windows-based products are still popular, given that a lot of companies still rely heavily on Microsoft’s productivity suite, like Microsoft Office, and also because of the familiarity of the Windows interface that will save companies time from having to retrain their staff. However as we mentioned earlier, Apple’s share of the market is expected to increase in the coming years, but as to whether it will eventually overtake Microsoft remains to be seen.