Vertical monitors are superior

The title pretty much sums it all, normally screens have a horizontal orientation, but that is something that feels unnatural and almost arbitrary. It seems that screens default to horizontal, but vertical orientation seems a much superior choice.

A4 sheets of paper are 210x297 millimeters, tables usually have many more rows (datapoints) than columns (categories), there are many more lines of information in a file than characters on a line (that applies to code, books, websites, etc.). So why should screens be oriented horizontally? For example, with a vertical screen, a whole page of a paper of pdf can fit on the screen, making it much more comfortable to read. In summary, more information fits in the same amount of pixels, it just depends on how you orient them.

To further prove my point, it is not uncommon that websites dedicated to text (online newspapers, substack, blogs, etc.) have an empty wide space at both sides, to make the text fit in a nice centered column, why not make the monitor be columnar from the beggining. (Thinking of real newspapers and papers, sometimes the content is even more verticallized as it is displayed within two or three columns in the same page).

Also, we humans are also vertical, making it much more handy for us to handle long narrow stuff rather than short wide objects. Think on how you would carry a stick or wood plank (only two dimensions are allowed, can’t carry the plank under the arm, spanning from front to back). That motivates how written documents were in the past, they were rolled up vertically instead of spanning to the side (to prevent you from needing to unroll completely each time you need to read a new line, but instead allowing you to get the information as you unroll). For your information, nowadays books use a third dimension (depth) and stack many unrolled mini-scrolls on top of each other.

On the other hand, horizontal screens can make sense for multimedia, as films, games and other entertainment resolutions are typically horizontal (unless your main entertainment is tik tok scrolling, but we don’t approve any of that here). Overall, entertainment makes a small portion of all uses that a computer offers, so, for me, it’s a small price to pay for having a vertical monitor, since the benefits far outweight that perk.

I believe that for most cases vertical monitors are superior, and good thing is that most monitors are typically easy to rotate, just unscrew some screws (luckily they are in a square disposition) and screw them back rotating the monitor 90 degrees. Sometimes it is not as easy, but come on, monitor stands aren’t particularly complicated feats of engineering, so a bit of easy DIY is enough to turn any monitor into a vertical one (of course if the monitor doesn’t have a rotatable support).