Three Bullish Apple Data Points

According to a new report, small and medium sized businesses prefer Apple AAPL devices to all others. In fact, according to a study by Intermedia, the margin between Apple and everybody else is huge.

According to its report, about 190,000 iPhones and iPads were activated on its network during the first 10 months of 2013. The second most popular, Samsung, SSNLF only had 29,000 activations.

Specifically, the iPhone 5S logged 6,906 activations compared to the 5C that had 1,521. The iPhone 5, 4S, and 4 logged more activations than the lower-cost 5C. Why such a lackluster performance for the 5C? Intermedia believes that small business owners are less price conscious and prefer a full-featured phone over the stripped-down 5C.

Intermedia is a third-party provider of hosted Exchange delivering integrated email, calendars, and contacts to more than 700,000 business customers.

In other news, a November study by research firm Changewire found of all the people who reported being in the market for a tablet, 72 percent said they would only consider an iPad. That’s up from 55 percent reported during the firm’s August survey.

Samsung dropped 13 percent to only 9 percent and Google’s nexus fell three percent to nine percent.

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Of the iPad buyers, 55 percent said they would purchase an iPad Air, 16 percent wanted an iPad mini with Retina display, and 17 percent weren’t sure which model they would purchase.

Finally, another analyst released a report that advised investors to stop putting so much weight on the market share number. Charlie Wolf, of Needham & Co. said that market share matters “very little” because the Apple ecosystem is so vast that each customer will purchase more than just the device. This will include apps, music, and other hardware devices. Google’s Android devices hold a larger market share but the margins are lower and the ecosystem isn’t as developed.

"Indeed, there appears to be no correlation between market share and the viability of a platform. In surveying the variables that determine the viability of a platform, we would argue that the breadth and depth of the platform's application library and ecosystem play a far more important role than does market share,” Wolf said.

Still, worldwide market share for iOS devices continues to rise. It now sits at 9.2 percent—up from 3.5 percent in 2009.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Tim Parker had no position in the above name securities.