Could it be that Apple, that arbiter of design sensibility, is stymied by the screen resolution problem? We’re not saying they are — and we weren’t able to independently verify the information below — but it is true that the new Mac product pages are designed at a greater width than the rest of the Apple site, including the homepage. That’s interesting in itself.

Our reporter*, Charles Gaba, has the story:

I had a lively debate about the horizontal scrolling issue with some of my fellow Mac users earlier this week when Apple announced their new Intel-based Mac models; as part of the launch, they revamped their home page at apple.com to require a 1024x768 window, as well as the sections devoted to the new iMacs and MacBook Pro. Interestingly, 2 days later, they revamped the home page *again*, back down to 800x600, but the new product sections are still at 1024x768.

Something tells me that Apple’s design & marketing teams are engaged in a raging debate over this issue even now!

According to one popular webstats service (TheCounter.com), 800x600 displays have dropped down to about 22% of the global market as of last month.

I’ve also put up a resolution trend chart on my own site (based on TheCounter’s numbers) which might be of interest:

http://www.brainwrap.com/faq/screen_resolution.html

* Charles is not actually our reporter. That was a “joke.” This is from a comment to an earlier CoFactors post.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 11:44 am and is filed under Screen Resolution.