October 16, 2026
Device choice is a cost strategy, not an employee perk
- Last updated 10/16/2026
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Every company now chooses from the same menu of device options, including laptops, phones, tablets, and a growing list of wearables, each available across multiple operating systems, screen sizes, and price points. Most companies still simplify that menu into one or two standard configurations and hand them out the same way regardless of role. United Airlines doesn’t, because it can’t.
The airline runs more than 190,000 devices across 100,000 employees, including phones and scanners for gate and ramp staff, kiosks and digital signage in terminals, and Windows and Mac laptops running the business behind the scenes. All of it is managed as a single estate, persona by persona, rather than as one standardized catalog applied to everyone.
That’s a different way to think about a device fleet than most companies use, and it’s the more accurate one.
Device choice was never really a perk
For years, letting employees pick between a Mac and a Windows laptop, or which phone to issue, was treated as a retention gesture. Almost like the technology equivalent of a nice office chair. The Omnissa 2026 State of Digital Workspace report shows that framing was wrong. The report’s own configuration data explains why.
Mac deployments cluster around pro users who need heavier local specs for large codebases, rich media, or complex datasets, while Windows deployments skew toward a flatter mix of utility and frontline roles that lean on cloud/virtual desktop storage, where a large local drive is, in the report’s own words, “an unnecessary expense.”
Without visibility into how a device gets used, the report warns, “procurement teams may be left guessing,” and relying on static spreadsheets and assumed refresh cycles “could lead to immense capital waste.” That’s over-provisioning and under-provisioning happening at the same time, inside the same fleet.
A gate agent doesn’t need the fastest processor on the market. They need a device that survives a full day of scanning boarding passes back to back, works under terminal lighting and jet-bridge glare, and never leaves a passenger waiting at the gate for it to reboot. A general-purpose laptop would waste money on compute they’ll never touch, and it would still fall short on the one spec that actually matters here, durability.
The industries where this shows up clearest
A device on a retail or wholesale floor spends its day being dropped, scanned, and passed between shifts, not running heavy software. That reality shapes what actually gets deployed. Rugged handheld scanners and tablets built to survive drops, spills, and constant handling replace general-purpose laptops or phones entirely.
The report’s data shows how concentrated that choice has become. Retail and wholesale companies overwhelmingly favor one manufacturer for that job, Zebra, which holds 59% share in that vertical specifically.
Transportation tells a related but distinct story. Durability matters less here than size. A driver or field technician needs something pocketable, and the iPad Mini captures 53% of that industry’s tablets as a result. Retail and education want the opposite. Between 81% and 88% of their iPads are the standard, full-size model, chosen not for portability but for low-cost, mass deployment across kiosks and shared devices.
Laptops split along a similar line, at the far end of the spectrum. High-tech and services companies overwhelmingly choose the MacBook Pro, at 84% and 61% share respectively, because their users are developers and analysts whose time costs the company far more than the hardware does.
None of these choices are arbitrary. Each reflects the same underlying pattern. Hardware selection tracks the job a device has to do, not a blanket company policy.
What happens when the fleet actually gets matched to the job
Mattheeuws Transport, a Belgian logistics firm running bulk freight across Europe, already had the device choice right. It issued ruggedized Samsung phones and tablets built to survive drops, dust, and extreme temperatures on the road. That got the hardware right. It didn’t, on its own, get a new driver moving any faster. Every new driver still needed that device configured and secured by hand before they could use it, a two-day process.
Automating that provisioning through Omnissa Workspace ONE cut onboarding to under two hours and saved the company an estimated €15,000 a year. The device didn’t change. What changed was applying the same persona-specific thinking to how it gets deployed, not just which one gets chosen, matching the process to a driver’s job that involves fast turnover and no time to sit in an IT queue.
United Airlines runs a similar idea at far greater scale, more than 190,000 devices across 100,000 employees spanning phones and scanners for gate and ramp staff, kiosks and digital signage in terminals, and Windows and Mac laptops running the business behind the scenes.
Rather than manage each of those as its own siloed program, United’s Enterprise Endpoint Engineering team unified all of it under one platform, Omnissa Workspace ONE, Assist, and Intelligence, delivering what the company describes as a secure, connected experience from the frontline to the back office.
United isn’t managing one fleet. It’s managing every persona in the company under a single strategy and treating that as the point rather than a complication.
The lifecycle math most companies aren’t doing
The distinction between choosing the right device and deploying it well matters even more once lifecycle enters the picture.
The report’s telemetry shows Macs remaining useful far longer than Windows machines: 11.5% of Macs are still in service into year six, compared with 1.8% of Windows devices, a gap of 6.5 times. A Windows PC behaves like a three-year asset. A Mac behaves like a five-plus-year-old one. A company refreshing both on the same cycle is either replacing Macs early, wasting budget, or running Windows machines past the point they’re still reliable.
The report’s reliability data backs up why that gap exists. Windows devices generate 3.1 times more forced shutdowns and 7.5 times more unresponsive app hangs than Macs, the kind of instability that tends to compound rather than improve as a machine ages.
The same logic applies to frontline hardware on a different axis. A rugged Zebra tablet isn’t measured against a three-year or five-year clock. It’s measured against how many drops it survives, how many times it changes hands between shifts, and how many temperature swings it takes before it becomes a support ticket. Persona-based procurement means running that math separately for every device category a company owns, not on one refresh calendar for all of them.
The next persona is already showing up
Wearables are the clearest sign this isn’t a static picture. The report found Apple Watch adoption in the enterprise grew 36% year over year, concentrated almost entirely in transportation and pharma, where hands-free access to shift schedules, logins, or safety alerts matters more than a full screen.
It’s the same instinct behind Mattheeuws locking its drivers’ devices into kiosk mode, running a single fuel-logistics app instead of a general-purpose phone. The job doesn’t need a computer. It needs the smallest interface that gets the right information to the right person at the right moment.
Most device catalogs don’t have a line item for that yet. Persona-based procurement is what lets a company add one before a competitor does.
Why this is becoming a hiring question, not just a budget one
Job candidates are starting to ask about device choice during the interview, not after they’ve already been hired, the same way they’re starting to ask what AI tools a company provides and what limits come with them.
Hemant Sahani, Omnissa’s VP of Product Management for Workspace ONE, made that point on the AI at Work podcast. A company still handing out identical hardware to a warehouse associate, and a software engineer isn’t just spending inefficiently. It’s signaling, to both, that it hasn’t thought carefully about either job.
See your fleet clearly and spend where it counts
Persona-based procurement only works when you know how every device performs for the person using it. digital employee experience (digital employee experience (DEX)) from Omnissa, powered by Workspace ONE and Omnissa Intelligence, gives you real-time visibility into device health, performance, and user experience across every persona in your fleet. Use it to spot productivity drains early, plan refresh cycles around real data, and fix issues before employees notice.