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What I think this is for...
Authored by: styrafome on Jul 18, '05 11:51:11AM

I suspect that this feature was added to catch up to Windows.

See, back in the 80s, you could get a Mac with a Radius Pivot Display. It was an innovative combination that let you rotate your workspace from horizontal to vertical so you could naturally view tall orientation pages like Word documents.

In the 90s, Radius moved on to other things and Apple didn't pursue auto-rotation of the monitor. Sadly, Windows picked up this feature. It got so bad that my friend felt cheated last year when he went out and bought a Samsung pivoting monitor, brought it home, plugged it into his G5 tower, and it didn't pivot the desktop when he pivoted the hardware. It turns out OS X didn't support auto-rotating the desktop in Panther with any video card. Pivoting was a Windows-only feature. (In his defense, I find that some of these monitors are advertised in Mac retailer catalogs with the pivoting feature, when they should not be. The retailers are simply using the generic ad copy and, improperly, are not editing them for Mac-only limitations.)

Now Apple seems to have figured it out. They finally added a pivot feature to Tiger so you don't have to have a Windows box to enjoy a monitor like that one, though specific video cards are still required. I think the pivot feature is not hidden on desktops. It is hidden on laptops because normal users aren't expected to be rotating their laptops awkwardly 90 degrees.

Therefore, having a hidden pivot feature on Mac laptops is not necessarily a harbinger of tablets, not if you know your Mac and Windows history.

The funny thing is, whether Apple added pivot support for desktops or for eventual tablets, either way the basic reason was that Apple needed to catch up to Windows.



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