Yep, agreed it’s different if you know the person posting. I will happily use referral links in my reviews, as people know me on those sites, and also because we have a policy of only reviewing products we like (if we expect to like a product and don’t, we don’t write the review). But I wouldn’t do it here, where most people don’t know me from Adam.
Personally, I think that’s a shame.
Boom! An Adam analogy never falls far from the Apple tree. 
There are arguments on both sides (it can of course be useful to know that a product isn’t any good), but what most of our readers want from reviews is recommendations for products and services they might like to use.
That said, it’s rare that a product is bad enough to abandon a review plan. Some reviews are mixed, but there’s enough appeal to make it of interest to people who may tolerate the weaknesses.
Objective reviews (good or bad) are useful because they stick to the facts of what simply does or doesn’t work.
Subjective reviews can be interesting, but because the reviewer’s subjectivity cannot be exactly the same as a reader’s subjectivity, differences are still likely to appear.
I’m a Wittertainee (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvdrj). I enjoy listening to Kermodian raves and rants, even though I disagree with many of them.
Similarly, I’m happy to read a negative product review because I know that the reviewer’s subjective view is not my own. Whatever they might say about a product, if they are being subjective they are only saying if the product is suitable for them or not. I can still read between the lines, read other views, and do my own research before making my own judgement.
In the majority of cases, a review says as much about the reviewer as it does about the reviewed item. How many times have we read reviews/forums where people have ranted about X product not working, when in fact the product does work but they don’t know how to make it work? We all have to filter out the reviewer’s personal feelings and shortcomings. Do many people buy products on the strength of just a single review?
I’d be happy for 9to5Mac to explain why X fell short of the reviewer’s expectations…the product still might do what I or someone else wants it to do.
All reviews are subjective. If you just want facts, you can get those from the manufacturer’s website (any company that lies about objectively-proveable facts wouldn’t last long).
I’m not going to try a product unless it appeals to me, otherwise it would be like me reviewing a book genre that doesn’t interest me. I can’t review a fantasy book in any meaningful way when even the best-written fantasy bores me.
So, I review products that seem like a good idea, to me, and report on how well they perform, in my view.
Oh, yes. The mobile coverage claimed by phone companies is exactly as stated, and MS products have always worked exactly as claimed in their marketing. And my car really does do 58 mpg.
All those things have disclaimers on them for good reason. 
Recently I decided to get a portrait capable monitor for a couple of reasons. First, for the use with Scrivener and Scapple. Second, I do some html and coding work and the vertical real estate allows for far more code to be visible. Many (many, many) years ago I used one for similar work and loved it. The cost is no more than a regular monitor, so the investment gives you options for anything that comes up.
In Terry Gilliam’s latest, The Zero Theorum, everyone uses huge portrait monitors. At one point the protagonist, in a fit of non-conformist rage, tears his monitor mounting apart so that he can use it in landscape mode.
I had been turning my monitor sideways, but then I got a decent 27" monitor to connect to my docked vintage Thinkpad (so I most definitely will not be talking here about magnificent display quality). In landscape orientation, it’s about 13 inches high. I do nothing but academic writing, so before Scrivener I had been using it basically as two side-by-side monitors with various kludges for dividing the screen.
But I generally agree with the gist of this thread. (And the reason I don’t replace my old 4x3 laptop is that because all I ever work with is documents, any variation of “widescreen,” in a laptop smaller than a bar fridge, is just too short vertically.)
Oh, and Scrivener solves the multiple-document problem, of course, without having to divide up the screen.
I worked for a while (in grad school) as the assistant to a very famous journalist. He wrote everything on an old manual typewriter, and I used a beat up old computer in my office. Sitting at his desk, though, was a (for then) pretty high tech computer with one of those early vertical monitors, which he never used. Life is so unfair!
I’ve never taken the step to go that vertical, but if I did I might consider using a more conventional shaped monitors (not one of these new fangled cinema style ones) and tipping that to the side. It would provide, perhaps, the ideal verticality.
I use two monitors on my computers (one iMac, where the second monitor is an unmatched big old thing I had laying around; the other Linux with two identical medium size monitors). If I had a choice between two standard layout monitors and one vertical, I’d pick the two monitor option.
But as I sit here writing this I’m eying my Linux machine, thinking of what I’d have to do to tip the monitors over…
Wait – is that Test Drive over on the right? Bolt from the blue. Might be wrong. Might be right…
Wait (again) – what’s the slogan of the Consultant? “Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, always certain?”
In the past, I was looking for a vertical orientation capable monitor. My current 24" HP monitor (LP2475w) is actually capable of that.
However, in the meantime monitors have grown bigger and bigger, so now thay can easily display two full pages side-by-side. I no longer need my monitor to stay vertical, since I can already see a vertical page with it.
However, I sometimes like to put my iPad in vertical when writing with an external keyboard. But then I like to see the side binder, so horizontal is my preferred orientation even there.
Paolo