Vertical screens are fantastic, they feel natural for so many coding tasks. I bought one for home and adaptation took less than a week. Now have a hard time going back to horizontal when working from the office. Recommended!
My Mac IIcx with Apple Portrait Display was a lovely system.
Luckily most modern screens like my LG can be pivoted to vertical, and then the Mac lets you specify the rotation. There's no more need for vertical-only screens.
I never got into the whole vertical screen thing. There must be something to it, though, because the smart people at Xerox designed the Alto[0] with one. Apple also came out with a vertical display a year after the Radius display came out[1].
I find it hard to believe that an idea that's resurfaced 3 times in less than 2 decades is a bad idea. Maybe it's a good idea, but not good enough to overcome peoples' internal resistance to change? Maybe it's actually such an off the wall idea that it actually creates some of that resistance?
In any case, I can't imagine anyone would want to come out with a fixed, vertical display these days, though. A rotatable display seems strictly superior in most cases, and is reasonably well supported (at least in OSX and Linux -- not sure about Windows). The only advantage a fixed display might have over a rotatable display is that perhaps a fixed display could be a smidge more compact, due to not needing the mounting and rotation hardware. But, again, these days, displays are generally pretty thin, so I'm not sure that would even make any difference.
I guess you have to try it for a few hours to get it. Mine is a non-orientable LG monitor (https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq750-c-dualup-monitor). The near-square aspect ratio makes it wide enough to stay confortable if work goes horizontal for a bit. Of note, the other LG model _does_ rotate (28MQ780)
I'd say they're less popular because it's seen mostly as an oddity (if seen at all). We've adopted the mindset that screens are to be horizontal without regard for their purpose. Also, because less are produced, they are more expensive, although not prohibitively so.
A rotating screen has multiple constraints:
- needs to be firmly attached to the desk or have a heavy stand
- requires more desk space to operate than the horizontal because it goes as wide as the diagonal while it rotates
- cable management can be more difficult, especially if used as a USB hub
- OS dynamic orientation management should be ok (Windows too) but might bring occasional challenge with some apps?
Strong :+1: from me. I am typing on a 27" retina iMac with a second 27" Thunderbolt display on my right, in portrait mode thanks to a SuperMac stand that was as expensive as a cheapo LCD in its own right.
But it's fantastic for reading long PDFs and other not-readily-resizable documents, for searching through my emails and so on. Much more use than a widescreen – whose adoption was driven, not for computers or software or ergonomics or anything, but by the commodities of the scale of production of TV screens.
I always assumed that was the reason too, but it feels like there was really only a narrow window when there was a significant crossover between monitor panels and TV panels.
Most all new TVs are 32" or larger, so that's not going to widely impact what 20-27" monitor panels can benefit from. Even when smaller LCD TVs were popular, they were often 720p or 1266x768 panels, but most monitors were 1080p.
OTOH, maybe it was more of a second-order thing: people were primed from TV and movies to expect wide-format content, so monitor makers had to produce products that satisfied that; people don't like letterboxed/pillarboxed displays.
Don't underestimate the effects of tradition. "We do things this way because we do things this way" is one of the strongest effects in technology.
Secondly, I suspect, but do not know, that there are effects here of making big panels and then cutting smaller panels around the edge of the large one.
Another portrait display user here! I use a 19:10 display rotated to 1200x1920. Not retina but I'm happy with it. I have window manager keyboard shortcuts set so I can position windows as halves, thirds, quarters, full screen, push windows to the MacBook display or my iPad. It's a powerful setup. It's the one great thing Apple neglected to take from Xerox PARC. Also interesting that more people don't do it in their desktop when everybody uses iPhone in portrait.
Early workstations (Alto, CADR, PERQ etc) were portrait, and a lot of development was done on portrait ASCII terminals too (e.g. AAA). I was always puzzled as to what caused the switch in the mid 80s.
