I take a lot of portrait-formatted pictures. These people tend to be pretty much always vertical, which makes their clothes "fall" better. Now, when I retouch these pix on my Mac, with a stock graphics card, I have, yes, this little problem of wasted screen area.

As it stands, I use a pivoting 21" monitor, the Samsung 213T. It's cheap, has decent color and good uniformity, and does all right as a photographer's display. It also costs about half as much as an Apple 23". However, unfortunately, Mac OS does not support screen pivoting, unlike the PC, on which it can be implemented with third-party software.

Some ATI retail cards do have this feature, hardware accelerated, under the name Versavision. In fact, Apple supplies OEM versions of these cards, like the ATI Radeon 9600, which came slotted in place on my pricey professional Dual 2.5 top-of-the-line machine. However—you guessed it—screen rotation is disabled on the cards you get when you buy a Mac.

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We've reached the point in my article where my frustration turns into paranoia. First, I'll make my frustration clearer, and describe my personal workaround; then I'll explain why I think Apple does this, and last I'll indicate that there's a safety valve, namely buying an Eizo monitor.

My frustration stems from a few hours of retouching with Photoshop on a rotated monitor. Using a mouse is hopeless in these cases, as a sideways-turned mouse makes the cursor skittle crazily like escaping prey.

My favorite workaround for portrait retouching is to hook up a Wacom tablet which I hold short side toward me. The pen is then nicely coordinated with the rotated screen, no problem. But the menus and palettes are all lying on their sides. Duh!

To mitigate the problem of the rotated menus, I often only rotate the screen halfway and work diagonally. The handheld Wacom pad makes this feasible.

Now for my paranoid explanation of why Apple makes my life unhappy: It's all about money, Sunshine.

An Apple 23" Cinema Display is, in fact, shorter than a standard 21-incher. And the Cinema Display cannot be turned on its side with its standard foot anyway.

As a result, photographers shopping for a retouching monitor for portrait shots find themselves pushed toward the excellent but pricey $3,000 Apple 30", when some cheap 20" or 21" third-party monitor would amply suffice if only it could be rotated.

This asymmetry is exacerbated in Europe, because our standard paper size of 21 by 29.7 centimeters is narrower and taller than the U.S. letter size.

Yes, I've heard a rumor that screen rotation has been demonstrated on the 30-incher to help Apple win the broadsheet publishing market. But I'd like it to work on each and every OEM card and display. Which would mean a screen-rotation-display preferences panel supplied as a standard feature of Mac OS X.

Such a standardized rotation feature would make every pivoting display on the market suitable for retouching, and we could forgive Apple for choosing an HD format for its professional displays.

However, in case Apple doesn't yet get the message about its customers' wishes, the market is supplying some competition to keep them honest. Eizo has enabled screen rotation as a hardware feature in its newest displays. These monitors are becoming the tools of choice for photographers anyway, thanks to their excellent color accuracy.

I think it's about time Apple forgot about marketing trickery and went back to providing customer value. But then, they do both so well, don't they?

Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.