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The End of Non-Widescreen Laptops?
Santi Onta writes "Today Lenovo retired the last NON-widescreen laptop they offered (the T61 14.1) from the market, and Lenovo is just an example (Apple, Sony, HP, etc. are the same). I understand the motivation behind all the laptop manufacturers to move to widescreen: they can still advertise that they offer 14.1 or 15.4 screens, but the screen area is smaller, and thus they save more money. Some people might like widescreens (they are useful for some tasks), but any developer knows that vertical space matters! Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity. How can laptop manufacturers still claim that they look after their customers when the move to widescreens is clearly a selfish one? I just wish they offered non-widescreen laptops, even if it were for a plus (that I'd be more than happy to pay)." I've always preferred the widescreen aspect ratio -- vertical matters, but having two nice wide columns always mattered more to me. Until this reader's submission, I hadn't realized that it was such a contested issue. Does this matter?
My laptop screen is wide format (1920 x 1200). With that many pixels you can easily have 4 edit windows up at once (2 x 2 array) with each one having the "standard" 80 columns and 25 lines. This still leaves plenty of room around the edit windows for testing windows, frequently accessed desktop icons, etc.
I admit that stuff on the laptop screen is a bit small (it is ~15 inch diagonal), but when using my 24 inch monitor (which I use 99.9% of the time) the display is a thing of beauty.
I thought I would add in a few more points that might influence your stance on this. While standardizing on one is great, I think that we should stick to letting the consumer have the option.
... what with the phone home possibilities of hardware and all. Oddly enough, half the laptops here are IBM's Thinkpads and the other newer half are Dell XPS's (which ironically spurred the widescreen incidents). Leave it to a Fortune 500 company to waste cash on desktop-replacement-laptops.
... something about horizontal viewing that makes me happy. Although I don't do that on laptops or play Warcraft anymore, it may be something to consider.
...
At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device). While this may sound trivial, imagine sitting at a desk facing a class of 100+ people who are looking at huge screens behind you. Not only end consumers but also the enterprise prefers the choice. Although this is kind of a non-issue if only Lenovo is doing that because my employer won't buy from China
And--I'm sure this will come up several times--there is my DVD collection which is mostly widescreen as I have a widescreen TV at home. For this reason, I personally may prefer a widescreen. However, most DVDs are non-widescreen and laptop screens are small enough as it is without having the lost real-estate. Again, probably a trivial aspect unless you travel and watch DVDs a lot.
I do enjoy Warcraft on wide screens though
I agree with the submitter that it is important indeed to leave this decision up to the consumer. Actually, since this is just Lenovo, I wonder if this will hurt their sales? If the consumers want it, the companies will notice
My work here is dung.
Less vertical space = [b]fewer[/b] lines of code [b]on[/b] the screen = more scrolling = less productivity.
I suppose there are developers out there who develop primarily on a laptop. Shoot, I'm even one of them, since we only get laptops at my job.
But I have a docking station hooked up to a 19-inch LCD that I do almost all of my work on, and the laptop display is my secondary display I use to keep my documentation, watch windows, etc. on.
I would think that most developers either have this kind of setup or do most of their development on desktops, which are generally more powerful anyway.
Having bought a T61p with 1920x1200, I now have 2 gnome panels (one left and one on the right side, both 160 pix wide), which offer me lots of room for applets and nicely provide me with a clean 1600x1200 desktop to work on.
My suppliers got problems getting the normal LCD screens ; they are all widescreen.
I've been forced to buy 2 widescreen LCD's because none of my suppliers could get me decent 20/22" non-widescreen LCDs.
Pretty annoying when coding overnight through a secure shell session, I must say...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
they were the same aspect ratio as an HDTV.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
At work, I've never said to myself, "Damn! I wish this screen was wider so I don't have to scroll!". Most websites are designed so that you don't have to. Vertical scrolling is the only scrolling I do, and a taller monitor is better for that.
At home, more and more gentlemen's videos are being shot in widescreen. So it makes sense at home but not at work.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Really?
hang brain.
I agree with the OP that portrait is best. After all, it is anti-social to write code or text more than 80 columns wide.
However, I am afraid they have to go with the lowest common denominator, that is people watching DVDs. Widescreens make sense if computers are DVD players that can check email.
My little Linux and tech blog
nope, it doesn't matter.
If real estate matters and you are not really mobile (ie, sitting at a desk coding) then get a stinking monitor with huge resolution/display.
We could all learn to use laptops sideways for coding:
Boss: Why are you lying down?
You: To be more productive!
Mind the frickin' laser...
Turn it sideways.
I would much rather have a wider screen. Most coders have multiple windows open, and additional width proves more easy for me to use in that case. In addition, long code statements won't fit on a narrow screen and having to scroll sideways to read your code PLUS scroll vertically is a major annoyance. By going wide you removing ever having to scroll sideways - unless you're in excel. It's a big plus for me.
Dell still makes the Latitude D530 in 4:3 ratio, so they're not dead quite yet.
I'm on a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet. As far as I can tell, they are still being sold, and it's a standard 12.1" display on the Tablet and the standard model.
- oZ
// i am here.
14.1" with 1400x1050 vs. 15.4" 1600x1050 ? yes, i choose as a developer the last one. The eye sees more left/right than up/down. With the extra 200x1050 i can keep open my Outline in Eclipse _without_ taking place from my editor in the middle. And for films watching is great too. So yes, widescreen, no gloss ( it's a tool, not a bling ;) ).
How many people actually write code, or for that matter, any long documents? It mostly about media now days where the ability to watch a wide screen movie is a selling point. And, wider screens are a boon to people who use graphics applications like Photoshop where the extra width gets filled with palettes.
Write shorter methods. That is all.
I wrote parts of this stuff
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800 vertical pixels is more than 768
Most if not all companies who are shipping laptops, Apple, IBM, Dell, etc... Are purchasing or sourcing their LCD panels to a third party. There are only a handful of companies left producing LCD panels.
It won't take much to force wide screen panels down the consumers throat. If one of the big names stops offering traditional panels, and then a second large laptop company follows suit, it won't be long before the price of normal LCD's goes way up in price. At that point watch for the rest of the manufacturers to follow right along and *poof* no more traditional LCD panels, or at least no more traditional panels without a *huge* premium.
A commenter in an old thread had the explanation for this:
Widescreen monitors are about keeping the cost of LCDs high - providing a new "feature" that people have to pay for without actually providing any costly new functionality.
Some time after widescreen becomes ubiquitous you can expect them to reintroduce 4:3 monitors as the new thing.
I find widescreen is actually much better for development. I'm mainly programming in Netbeans or Eclipse and having the navigator on one side and the 'outline' on the right is great. On a standard aspect monitor, this leaves the central portion for working on code really small. On widescreen (I use a 20" widescreen) this central code portion is much bigger. It's much the same in Visual Studio.
Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something, I could agree. Even then though, do I really need 100 lines on the screen at once?
I'd much rather have half the lines on the screen and be able to use the extra features of my IDE to aid in navigation and keep my concentration focused on the area that I'm working in.
I want a Unicorn. They won't give it to me. Instead I get a horse with a candle stuck to its head. What's your point?
"We look after our customers."
Do you have any more questions?
As far as I know, the only one who was, was that kitty who died in a day a year or so ago.
And, as long as we have two eyes positioned as they are, it is more natural and comfortable to have a widescreen display with an aspect ratio designed for it.
I've been working widescreen for a few years now and it's far more comfortable to me.
Not to mention, the two window / document thing is (obviously) handy...
Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity.
Muahaha, who ever scrolls? I don't scroll when I code, when I look for something I / or * it, n/N my way through occurrences etc.. Surely I'd rather have it occupy my entire screen than a 80x25 terminal, but when I code I care more about horizontal space because when line breaks things look more confusing, so if anything you'd rather see me coding in an elongated window, something like 140x25.
You just got troll'd!
Anytime you have competing form factors it's an issue... heck we had a glossy/matte screen thread here just last week. Personally, it's an issue for me, but for different reasons. I want 1000+ vertical pixels. And I want a small form factor that I can easily lug around. To get a 1000+ vertical pixels in a widescreen I need to have a 15 inch screen... 14.1 is my comfort limit. So I lose in this discussion. Not exactly a huge loss though.
.. widescreen of "equivalent" sizes to non-widescreen was actually more expensive. I could never figure out why people were willing to pay for *less* overall viewing area. It's really not a question of whether vertical or horizontal space is more important. Just multiply the height byt he width. Non-widescreen is bigger. Fewer pixels == cheaper to manufacture.
There's like.. one or two good monitors left that are non-widescreen high-res, sold at my favourite manufacturer.
I swear by widescreen laptops, for the simple reason that they let me read comic book scans in their native aspect ratio.
Like the man said, vertical desktop real-estate is king! At home I run 2048x1536 (gotta love CRTs), and at work I'm stuck with 1280x1024. While 1280x1024 isn't a wide-screen resolution, it does lack in vertical space. Having a desktop space that is 1280 pixels wide is much less of a problem than having something that is only 1024 pixels tall. Unfortunately this screen isn't rotatable either, otherwise my problems would have been at least partially solved. Wide-screen is fine, as long as you don't skimp on vertical desktop real-estate. If I can keep my 1536 pixels vertically, I care less about how much you give me horizontally (to a limit, of course)
Move sig!
non ACs posting these makes me sad. Also its sad yahoo sucks so much that they host viruses. But then yahoo was never too smart.
Don't even think about clicking that.
One thing to consider in this is the keyboard. As laptop manufacturers make their laptops smaller and smaller they are almost required to use widescreens in order to keep the device wide enough to have a useable keyboard.
I have one of the 1920x1200 mac book pros. Also, anytime I'm not on the road I have it dual headed to a 1680x1050 (both at home and work). I love it. I'd MUCH rather have multiple editors open side by side and have to deal with the scrollwheel on my trackball.
But still, I understand that everybody has different habits and I agree that the choices should be there.
is nice, beacuse all the media player apps I use from bed fit their controls into the bottom & top 5% of the screen
media player, VLC, winamp, the dvd software I use... the bars fit perfectly, I can leave them live and watch 16:9 content
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This is the real determining factor here.
My brand-spanking new ThinkPad T61p sports a 1920x1200 widescreen.
This is more screen real estate than my last ThinkPad, an A31p (1600x1200)
I can view EXACTLY the same number of lines of code on each of them. Except now, if I have a line that's slightly longer than 1600 pixels, I can look at it without scrolling.
Sure, physical-height-wise I have less screen. Big fscking deal. My vision is perfect. So I can enjoy maximum resolution without squinting or needing the screen magnifier.
If you have that much of a problem reading smaller, high-resolution displays, get your eyes checked and get glasses.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What is the actual percentage of the market for laptops who are developers? The summary almost makes it sound like it's the entire user base and that manufacturers are ignoring a huge and important market segment.
They only make widescreen. So, no, it doesn't matter which ones you like better. Personally, I find that widescreens take up too much space on small desks or in cramped areas and that I don't like the wider bag that I need to carry it in.
Just plug one in. Any way who wants to code on a laptop keyboard anyway. If the keyboard isn't an issue I guess you could use an iPhone to code, It's vertical.
PROBLEM : RATIO CHANGE = LESS SCREEN AREA
SOLUTION : BUY A BIGGER MONITOR.
If you want to talk about productive, then get an extra monitor or two. Personally I triple span my Macbook Pro 17" via 2 other monitors.
I think it's great that they standardize the ratios, now if they could only work on increasing PPI (Pixels Per Inch) like Apple did, that'd be great.
Having used an Inspiron 15.4inch with a 1600x1200 screen for some years, I recently had to get a replacement and all I could find were widescreen ones. As I use Dreamweaver a lot, I need lots of vertical space so I can have code, WYSYWIG and tools open. I had to pay extra for any screen above 1280x800 odd and eventually settled fo a 1680x1050 which is OK but still very cramped. Those extra 150 pixels make all the difference and the obsession with widescreen laptops sees rather shortsighted. My wife recently bought one too and after scorning me paying extra for a higher res is now regretting buying hers with the standard screen as she has to do way more scrolling on web sites now
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
if($laptopAspectRatio eq 'Widescreen') { print "all your code on one line!\n"; }
These laptops should make Perl one-liners at least a little easier to read.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
It's not just a case of the manufacturers being selfish. It's a form factor issue.
The biggest limiting factor on a laptop's width is the keyboard. Almost everything else you can shrink and expand without limitation. Resizing the keyboard is not as easy. By messing with the layout you can add or remove a row of keys but that's about it unless you want to significantly shrink the size of the keys themselves.
Add to that the fact that every centimeter of extra screen height equals a matching amount of extra case real estate in front that can't be put to very good use, where as extra width lets you expand the keyboard outward.
So, if you want a more portable laptop any shrinkage is going to have to come from the vertical instead of the horizontal. Also, many backpacks/bags/slip cases have the laptop inserted sideways so one that is smaller in that dimension is easier to get at.
Seeing as there is so much extra horizontal room with widescreen monitors and laptops, would it not make sense to use that space, rather than the smaller amount of vertical space for the interface?
Yes this matters. It is well-known throughout the publishing world that wide columns of text are harder to read than narrow columns. Our eyes are more suited to reading narrow columns of text than wide ones and having to jump from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen to read the next column is not optimal. The current generation of widescreen displays and the way text is laid-out onscreen causes you to lose track of which line you are reading and it also causes you to slow down in order to better keep track of your vertical position.
A display with a higher vertical to horizontal ratio makes it easier to read and edit text on. Text columns are naturally narrower so your eyes have less problems tracking horizontally and the columns are also higher which means that there is less scrolling. It also means that menu bars at the top or bottom of the screen or window take up a smaller percent of the vertical presentation, which uses the display more effectively.
Widescreen is better suited to video and pictures than it is for text. It would be nice to have displays optimized for text so that people who work with text can do so more effectively. One thing I try to do to counteract a widescreen is to place as many elements as I can (toolbars, etc.) in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one. By maximizing my vertical space and using the horizontal space to stack bars side-by-side I do what I can to create a narrow, high space for text. It would be much better to have a screen that was oriented this way in the first place but if you can't find one...
Sapere aude!
Learn the difference between "less" and "fewer."
Okay, so, developers need vertical space.
Developers are also a very small portion of the laptop market.
This is like saying, "Why does Bose spend their R&D budget on better speakers? Don't they know that deaf people don't care about sound quality?"
Personally, I prefer widescreen laptops. Widescreen video looks better, games give me that 'peripheral vision' effect that comes in handy in WoW and FPSs, and I can just hold my laptop sideways for reading e-books and comics and have them be roughly the same dimensions as they would be in real life.
How can laptop manufacturers still claim that they look after their customers when the move to widescreens is clearly a selfish one?
Welcome to the free market, son.
If the majority of your customers want widescreen displays, and as such that's the direction you choose, that's pretty much the definition of looking after your customers.
Wide screens might be better for developers these days with heavy IDEs cluttering the sides of the display with palettes, panels, etc. Thus you don't have much surface left for your code (or it is so narrow that you have to vertically scroll a lot more). At least all other devs at my place envy my wide screen... ;)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more. Junta
The percentage of coders in the over-all laptop market is probably less than 1%. The vast majority of laptop buyers want widescreen. The better question is why laptop manufacturers would create a line of laptops for such an incredibly small niche.
If you think there is a large market for coder/laptops start up a business yourself and make a killing. I won't be holding my breath on that.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I'd rather have a widescreen display, but one more vertical height than you can currently buy these days. Leave the width the same, just change to height.
Widescreen sucks bigtime, but for other reasons: presentations, multi-head setups etc.
Then coding this is not an issue: when I code, I'm always at a location with a real desk and an external screen that offers enough vertical space.
Last I checked, the Thinkpad X61 and X61s were still 4x3.
Sorry guys, ever since I started putting my homemade porn online, wide screens have become necessary.
If you know what I mean.
For desktop LCDs this doesn't have to be a bad thing, if the screen mount will rotate. Then you can have a 5:8 display instead of 8:5.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Dell has them:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d530?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~tab=bundlestab
...it's just not big enough, or you're not making good use of it. Expand some more of the properties/class explorer/help/design doc/debugger etc.etc. and you'll find the extra space useful.
The shape of most laptops are governed by the keyboard, not the screen. A quick check on my desktop keyboard without keypad shows it's about 13.5" wide. 13.5" wide is about 15" across, in other words, if you want a longer screen your laptop has to increase in size. If space matters, you'll prefer widesreen, if space doesn't matter get a 24" external or something...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The point is that Apple, once again, believes they know what their customers want and need better then the customers do.
Despite the droves of 12" PowerBook owners telling Apple how nice it is to have so much power and flexibility in a small package, and pleading for a 12" MacBook Pro, Apple gave us the underwhelming MacBook Air instead.
Despite the huge buzz of speculation that Apple would come out with an eMate-size sub-notebook to compete with the little Vaios and Zauruses etc., Apple gave us the oversized MacBook Air instead.
It's the same old story - the Reality Distortion Field(TM) only works inside Apple's walls. When it tries to spread outward it gets smacked down by Real Reality(TM).
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
While vertical height matters and is definitely useful, I find myself hindered more by lack of width than height these days. Try working on code in one window, with some reference code in another window, and maybe a website with the online documentation in another window without widescreen on a 15" or smaller monitor. Of course, you can mess about minimizing and maximizing back and forth, but a lot of times it's far more productive to be able to have at least 2 of those up side by side while maintaining enough width of the window to show the majority (or all) of the relevant lines of code.
Also, using a modern IDE like visual studio or eclipse on a 15" monitor can be somewhat miserable. Those are clearly designed to be used on a widescreen monitor, imo given the default layouts and how small your code window ends up.
This trend has been happening for a long time.
I do believe this issue matters because developers are used to using vertical real estate for most any new feature they desire to add. Menus, button bars, tabs, status bars, find bars, window manager/application bars. All of this stuff eats into your primary vertical viewing area. Which is usually vertically inclined, web browsing, document editing, code editing - all of which usually only incorporates a vertical scroll bar.
So the trends are for new application features to eat into your vertical real estate, while our vertical real estate is shrinking in real terms due to the growth of wide screens. This trend appears to be accelerating rather than abating.
IMHO, the way this should be solved is at the developer level. We need to stop inventing new tool bars that eat our vertical real estate and figure out reasonable solutions reside on the horizontal. And make more options for people to use the horizontal.
I use a start menu (or equivalent under KDE) on the left side rather than the bottom/top. I try and disable quick button bars where possible and use the menus/short cut keys. This saves some of that real estate. This mostly works, but some applications bring up the windows underneath my start bar since they make incorrect assumptions about it's location.
On the bright side, when screens get wide enough it becomes easier to do a side by side approach like a book. Two vertical sections rather than one. I like this end result, but not all applications play well like that. It would be nice to have some window manager type options that automatically resizes windows to a "book view" or side-by-side applications. I occasionally find this more useful than a single large vertical area might be as I might want two different files open at once.
If you go through the small business sections of many computer companies sites you will find that they offer a lot of the features they took away from the home market. They are also often better machines for around the same price (if you spec/quote carefully). This is similar to the glossy vs matte screen post from last week... Example Latitude D530 from Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d530
Since I'm a developer and prefer widescreen, and it seems the vast majority of other users (other, being non-developers, accounting for perhaps 99% (yes, totally made up, but my point stands) of the market) prefer widescreen, just how "obvious" is it that the move widescreen is selfish? Anyway, if you want to develop and see more lines of code, why are you using a laptop?
Whale
I'd think that the move to widescreen is global, and not reduced to laptops. Desktop screens in bigger sizes are only widescreen. I think 20" is about the maximum you get in 4:3. Even these are in very short supply. 22" and 24" are just widescreen, and of course I don't think we'll ever see a 30" 4:3 monitor, even if that were desirable.
I think the laptops are adapting to a general tide in the industry. It's probably not economically viable to keep making 4:3 screens. Also, the laptops have an easier time growing horizontally. You can after all offer a better keyboard. But vertically there is nothing you can add at the "other side of the clap" that has user value.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
It would be one thing if vertical resolution was sacrificed in order to change the display ratio, but that is not the case - extra horizontal resolution has been added. So I don't see why someone is crying that their display has extra pixels to the side.
If vertical resolution is so terribly important, rotate your display 90 degrees, set your laptop on its side and use an external mouse and keyboard.
Finally, I use IDEs all the time, and the extra horizontal resolution is worth its weight in gold. Gone are the days when interactive debugging meant the source code window had to be cropped down to nothing, because I needed variable watches, function stacks, class trees, a console and memory windows open all at once. Now all that is lined up the right side of the display, and I still have my normal editing layout to the left. The same has been true for pretty much anything I do - video editing with Premiere Pro CS3, photo manipulation with PSP, composing music with a sequencer (extra horizontal resolution is optimal for this), etc.
Better known as 318230.
It's called :vsplit. Twice the number of rows!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Where does it say they have retired the standard screen version => lenovo shop still has this version on sale
Get over it. I care so little about laptop screens switching form factor that I'm not even sure why I'm posting this.
... I have to say that horizontal space matters more than vertical space. It's horizontal space that lets you display header files and source files side-by-side without having to scroll or otherwise fiddle with the current view. That's the reason I buy widescreen displays.
I don't know if this is a factor in the move to wide screens or not, but supposedly the golden rectangle is the most visually pleasing rectangle. It has an aspect ratio of 1.618.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
The form factor allows for a lot less wasted space below, where the keyboard is, for a device that's overall smaller and easier to carry and stick on small tables. This seems like it was written by someone who never actually carries a laptop around, or just lugs it between desks and plugs it in.
If you're only using it at a desk, why not just buy a desktop and a widescreen monitor that you turn 90 degrees, so you can get full page views? (Actually, there have been laptops offering detachable, rotatable screens, but they have not been that popular)
I just opened my Macbook's terminal window and expanded it to full size. Got 209x53. That's on a 13 inch widescreen, with OSX's nonremoveable menubar and other window dressing, Monaco 10 pt. Unless you've got a cumbersome IDE, is that really not good enough for coding on the go?
It's the same old story - the Reality Distortion Field(TM) only works inside Apple's walls. When it tries to spread outward it gets smacked down by Real Reality(TM).
Better check your quarterly financial reports.
I hate to argue with someone when the contested point is mostly personal opinion, BUT... I have a gut feeling that macbook airs are selling at a faster rate than 12" powerbooks ever did. I think this is an issue of a number of vocal 12" PB advocates on the net making a lot more noise than the greater number of plain ol' consumers who are buying macbook airs. You can complain about apple not making the perfect laptop for you, but you can't complain about apple going after the most profitable market segment.
Size of the machine is a big issue for me.
I like small for portability.
I have a nice non-widescreen laptop.
If the screen was wider then there would be empty space on the bottom half of the clamshell - to the left and right of the keyboard.
To me... the screen should be the size of a reasonable keyboard. No bigger no smaller.
Widescreen is a waste.
As a coder with two 24" and a 30" in front of me now, I feel comfortable saying the OP needs less QQ and more Pew-Pew!
Full time coding on a laptop? This is the kind of person who whines when their tiny eyeglass screwdriver breaks when trying to open a gallon of interior/exterior latex paint.
Nice tool - wrong application.
Just rotate your laptop 90 degrees and now you have more than enough space for REALLY long code.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
They are wide screen, but you still get good vertical resolution (1920x1200). And you can even find some of those in a 15.4 inches footprint. Best of both worlds I guess.
I'm currently wondering if I'll order such a beast (ie Thinkpad T61p sku 64575KU) or just an externel LCD and settle for a dumb Toshiba laptop with 1280x800 resolution (the "standard" laptop at my job).
The laptop is becoming a toy to play games, movies and music. Of course it has to be wide screen.
We recently bought a 26" LCD HDTV for our bedroom, and she is not happy with the widescreen. Any show that is not broadcast in a widescreen format leaves those black bars on the side of the screen, effectively reducing the viewable screen to about 19" diagonal. The only alternative is to stretch it to fit the width (unacceptable to her or myself), or zoom in until it fits, which crops about 3" of the picture on the top and bottom.
After doing some research, I am finding it very difficult to locate a LCD Flat Panel TV that is NOT widescreen unless it is 19" or smaller. Why is there no market for people who like having a 4:3 aspect ratio? Most of our DVDs are fullscreen, and our Satellite TV is broadcast in fullscreen. I'm sure there are people out there who pay extra for HD programming and buy widescreen DVDs, but shouldn't the manufacturers try to accomodate both markets?
Another issue I have with small (32" or less) LCD HDTV screens is the resolution... most of them are 1366x768. What the hell is that? Standard Cable is 480i, DVD is 720p, and HD programs are 1080i or 1080p. Why aren't the native resolutions 1280x720p, so there would be no stretching of pixels in order to fill the screen?
Heck yes it matters. Ever try to use a widescreen laptop on an airplane in coach class? You need two trays to do that.
Well, thank god someone around here can understand a comment that wasn't written in crayon. Perhaps I'm just underestimating the "Traveler who is too much of a pussy to lug around three extra pounds, yet does not wish to switch batteries mid-flight" market segment, but perhaps not.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Be careful about who you want to lay the blame for on this transition. One of the major aspects of this is that the computer manufacturers do not manufacture the LCD screens themselves. Therefore, as the widescreen became more popular the factories were retooled to produce widescreen displays. The motherboards also have to fit, but with the screen change, the motherboard manufacturers do not produce motherboards for laptops in that form factor. There are always many different companies involved in the production of something as complex as a laptop. As a computer manufacturer, you can only produce based on what your suppliers can/will supply.
Solution: GET A SECOND MONITOR.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Let's see: Lenovo: ThinkPad R61i NG1D7AT 15.4'' 1280x800WXGA (wide) ---Versus--- Lenovo: ThinkPad R61i UV1DRAT 15'' 1024x768XGA (4/3) So...what do we see here? Both are in the same class. And the non-wide has a vertical resolution of 768 pixels - versus 800 pixels of the wide one. How can someone say he sees less lines of code? Well from my point of view you get MORE lines of code on the wide one. Am i wrong? ps: sorry for my bad English
Haven't had enough coffee yet, but isn't the area of a 14.1" diagonal screen the same regardless of whether its 4:3 or 16:10? isn't a 16:10 screen simply wider and shorter than a 4:3 screen?
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
"but any developer knows that vertical space matters! Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity."
Really? I guess I'm not a developer then. Or maybe you're just wrong. Yeah, I think that's it. I prefer wide screens over long screens. My panels at work allow me to rotate to Portrait if I wanted to do that. I don't.
We're not talking about iPods and iPhones. Read: MacBook Air demand trails that of original Intel-based MacBook, with winners like:
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Some desktop LCD panels let you rotate them by 90 degrees to get a 'portrait' format display, which is ideal for programming. Clearly all you need do is plug in an external keyboard and then prop up your laptop like a book, and you'd get a lovely narrowscreen display for running emacs.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
First off, why would anyone want to do (a lot) of developing on a laptop? If you find yourself actually sitting down at a desk, with a power outlet, doing actual *work* on a laptop, you should consider getting a separate screen and a decent keyboard for it. I realize that there are (hopefully small) number of developers that travel around with laptops and have to at least *show* code to customers on them, and the widescreen thing can cause a problem. But then again, a 15" laptop with 1680x1050 pixels still has about the same amount of vertical pixels as the old 15" 1280x1024 screens. Resolution has been bumped too, has it not? I don't remember seeing many 1600x1200 15" laptops...
And as for developing on widescreens, all the people at my office use two 20" widescreens, and the developers simply tilt one of them to vertical giving 1680 vertical pixels, or more lines of code than you really need to see. The same thing could perhaps be applied to laptops, although you probably want a separate keyboard if you are using your laptop opened like a book standing vertically on the desk...
Like X has done for ages, you wouldn't have that problem.
You'd have a GIMP-like window system with your outline and navigator on one monitor and your code on another.
And two 15" 4:3 screens are cheaper and have more real estate than one 20" 16:9.
I just posted a link above, reporting on the MB Air's shitty market performance to date. Here are a couple more.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/02/12/resellers-say-macbook-air-sales-arent-as-brisk-as-original-macbook/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/165960/macbook-air-sales-deflated.html
I can't locate sales figures for the 12" PB G4, but I can state anecdotally that I saw many of them, with satisfied owners. A reasonably fierce following, too. Conversely, I have not seen a single MB Air nor do I know anyone, including all members of a Mac users' mailing list I am on, who owns one or even wants to. I don't think Apple chose the most profitable market segment here.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
I had a 17" Powerbook, and I have to say, at that size, anything other than widescreen simply isn't going to fly. I can always find things to do with the space -- throw a dock on one side of the screen, open four Terminal windows and have room to spare -- but widescreen, it actually folds up nice and slim, fits in a backpack.
Can you imagine the same thing non-widescreen? Assuming I could even carry it anywhere, I'd be terrified of opening it -- that much more distance from the hinge to the outer edge means that much more leverage exerted on the hinge -- that much easier to break.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And I don't recommend that large a virtual display for general-purpose use; things can get "lost" in the corners ;-(
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
(Correction: that petition link is pretty limp; it is the wrong petition. I can't find the real one with ~50k signatures, though I found two more small ones. Please forgive me.)
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Hell, just run your screen at a higher res.....problem solved...unless you can't see :)
I'm typing this reply from a 17" LCD rotated to a portrait view.
'Nuff said.
My home monitor is a 21" 4:3, also rotatable.
Widescreen is great for watching movies, playing games and other entertainment, but for work I find vertical space far more important. Especially considering most programs chop screen space from the top and bottom, making workspace even smaller vertically.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
>Does this matter?
Absolutely. In fact I like non-widescreen 15.0 or 15.1" laptops. More vertical screen = more contents can be read while visiting newspapers or blogs. Of course more code too:)
I love to read articles and comments by individuals who make up figures to support their assumptions, but those that rely on general myths are even more fun. "Widescreens are smaller LCD surface area, so companies save money"--companies don't get to purchase LCD panels the way you purchase flooring for your kitchen, and in truth, the cost of a square inch of a widescreen LCD panel is higher than it is on standard aspect ratio panels. "we should stick to letting the consumer decide"--the thing is that the consumers do decide, but if you think that the individual consumer should have the power to influence the entire industry, then you probably still believe the US is a democracy. Crack open that civics textbook and let us know when you figure it out. The vast majority of notebook consumers do want widescreens, which is why we have them. It wasn't just a fun change for the industry, though it did happen to reduce the average size of notebooks by virtue of the fact that the chassis are smaller, etc. "most DVDs are non-widescreen"--not sure where this one came from, but I'd like someone to explain it to me. This was likely true of the VHS era, but the prevalance of the DVD format and the soaring popularity of HD formats has turned standard aspect ratio film into a feature offered only for holdovers who 'can't stand the black bars'. In any case, I hated my widescreen notebook screen because of the available resolution in a standard 15" monitor. Just picked up a new 'high def' Dell XPS notebook with 1920x1200 resolution in 15.4" and life is wonderful in mobile dev again. As another reader pointed out, however, I dock whenever possible and use 2x24" widescreen LCDs, which is by far the preferred mode. Screen space is king, but efficient use of the space available makes widescreen a smarter choice.
The fact is that the quality of modern 12" widescreens is so good - high contrast and sharp pixels - that I find it comfortable to work with smaller font sizes than on the older 15 inch screens.
I noticed last week that my standard development box - Win 64 with several VMs on it - is getting less and less use.
So, to my surprise, I find that widescreen does it for me.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
linux kernel code guidelines:
your code must fit in a 80 columns screens.
This = widescreens useless. You need vertical space more.
At the end of the day, I personally don't care a lot, unless this is a very small screen where you really lose a lot of vertical space
Eg. I got a 10.4inches laptop (R3) which is 4:3.
I code on it. I hack on it. I watch stuff. I do everything you'd do on a larger screen.
Now if it was advertised as 10.4 inches but 16:9 or rather, 16:10 like most screens now, it would be a major pain and i wouldn't buy that.
While we're on the topic, if we must have widescreen laptops, then why cant they use the extra horizontal keyboard real estate for a regular cursor control block (inverted T and pgup/pgdn etc in their normal correctly spaced and gapped positions)? I am sure some people swear by their regular numpad which has recently shown up on some widescreen laptops, but arent there at least as many people out there that spend all day editing text (and code) as there are folks that spend all day entering numbers?
He who does it first will have my laptop kilobucks.
Less vertical space does not mean you're losing coding space. In fact, I am usually editing (or at least referencing) more than one file at a time when coding, and it's rather nice to be able to just blow up my Xterm and :vnew several documents into vim, and have them all fit side-by-side on the screen.
Also, since my laptop is 1920x1200, it's got more vertical space than any screen I had had before, anyway.
I just thought it needed to be said, though I haven't really read the other comments so it's probably been said already.
Just drag your taskbar over to the right or left-hand side of the screen. You can see more buttons, and get more icons into the taskbar (quick launch on windows, whatever gnome calls it in ubuntu). It squares off your desktop nicely and is actually easier to access things quickly, for me.
And then stop bitching about it. People watch movies on their laptops; these are the customers the laptop companies are looking out for. Even other developers, myself included, prefer a wide desktop to a narrow one, so that lines never wrap. You do NOT have your finger on the pulse of consumer demand in this one, buddy.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Depends on your IDE. If you're using a bunch of terminal windows running vi, then I might agree with you, although I prefer to have a couple of windows side-by-side.
If, on the other hand, you're using Eclipse or Visual Studio, which have a bunch of toolboxes and other panels docked to the left- and right-side of the IDE, widescreen starts to look attractive.
1) widescreen panels do not come much cheaper than 4:3 panels for a lot of reasons
2) scrolling does not mean lower productivity
So, laptop manufacturers are not being "selfish" and they are certainly not trying to beat down coders. What was your point again? Oh, ranting on Slashdot's front page! Of course!
Next time get a provable argument and some verifiable facts under your belt before asking Slashdot why Lenovo, Apple and Dell are trying to make your life a living hell by making you use a scrollbar.
I was sooo resistent to getting my first laptop, I figured they just couldn't handle gaming, and the screen size just seemed soo small. But after finally getting one that was widescreen, I'm sold. :)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If it IS slowing me down, it must be in the noise... well below other slow-downs... like annoying co-workers, family, bodily functions, and Slashdot.
From my experience, nvidia's 3d stereo drivers (used for shutter glasses so you can play games in 3d) do not work with widescreen monitors. It intentionally disables that functionality. Likewise, the backlight for widescreen monitors clearly show through when you a rapidly turning pixels on and off, while they do not for "standard" monitors. My Dell 17 inch monitor with 16 ms response time is better for 3d than a brand new samsung with 2 ms response time (which like all the other widescreen monitors isn't really suitable at all, even with custom drivers).
I do all my development on a laptop, in a perfectly adequate 1024x768. Since I (mostly) work from home, right now I'm in an armchair. If the weather was better, I might swap that for a deckchair in the garden. If I want to be chained to a desk, I might as well go to the office.
Also, sometimes a laptop is the only option, e.g. when working on a customer site, travelling, etc. Once you're used to your triple-widescreen-monitor setup with your favourite keyboard and mouse, I think you're disadvantaged in those other situations. Personally, I prefer to be comfortable working with the lowest common denominator.
There's nothing wrong with widescreen. It's more suited to our eyes for watching movies, and it forces developers to consider how their app looks and feels when tiled on the screen and used in conjunction with other on-screen apps (ie, *gasp* multitasking) instead of being maximised all the time as if it where the only app.
Widescreen is also great for developers, artists, designers, writers, and many other professionals, since you can rotate the screens and get a vertical, page-oriented layout.
BUT, the problem is that rotation is rarely supported -- not on laptops, or on monitor stands. On graphics cards, it's "supported" usually, but without acceleration, which sucks. How hard can it be to rotate 90% before applying an operation on today's super-fast graphics cards?
I would argue that it is not really an issue, we use laptops to code on here at work, but we have docking stations and external flat panels on them. I would definately agree that from a coding perspective vertical space matters, but doing any coding on a laptop screen is a pain anyway.
With that said, the developers here all have the external screen as primary, and rotate it 90 degrees to give a nice tall screen. We use the laptop screens for email, docs etc.
There have been a few people commenting that wide screen is best to have the explorers and palettes etc to each side, but in Visual Studio, we tend to have them unpinned, and tabbed anyway, unless using any one extensively. You can also have them 'torn off' completely and float them onto the laptop screen.
So, I don't see it as a big issue, having widescreen only laptops, and I guess the consumer will vote with their wallets.
Merlin --- We're an autonomous collective... Help, Help, I'm being oppressed!!
I don't think the move to widescreen displays can be called completely selfish on the part of the manufacturers. To the non-tech savvy consumer something that is widescreen is viewed as a premium above that of normal aspect display. So yes the manufacturers save money on the smaller screens but many people think there getting more with a widescreen. The manufactures are more than happy to to sell the consumers what they demand, more so if it saves them money.
If 4:3 aspect displays were selling well, they wouldn't be end of life. The manufacturers would still be providing them if that's where the customers were placing their dollars. I think most people want 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio displays so that is what they are selling. I'm typing this on a 17 inch 1920X1200 display. I have not had a 4:3 ratio laptop in over 4 years. I have never looked back or lamented my decision.
WTF are you on about? This was about Lenovo. Guess you couldn't wait long enough for the next Apple submission to come out, eh?
Does it matter? in a word, no. I sincerely doubt it makes any programmer less productive. Could you imagine telling your boss that having a widescreen made you less productive? He'd look at you like you had a 3rd arm. Let's tag this one as slownewsday and move along.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
When I was in school we had some wide screen monitors that could be rotated 90 degrees so you could fit more text on the screen at once. However, I don't think it can be adapted very easily to a laptop.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If the resolution is high enough widescreen is fine by me, usually I just put my taskbars and docks on the left of the screen and i'm left with a 4:3 area for doing my work. The real issue for me is with the total crap laptop screens with 1280x800 resolutions where there isn't enough room to do anything like that. That said, i bought a Lenovo x61 a few months ago and I love it, the 12in isn't as small as it sounds, i can hardly tell the difference between this and a 15 in panel. Lenovo may reconsider their decision, seeing as the x61 and x61-tablet are their most popular products right now.
I refuse to buy widescreen under any circumstances.
Guess this means I'll never buy another new laptop again.
Hmm...I wonder if I can fit the guts of a newer laptop inside my Toshiba Tecra M3's case...the mainboard on that thing is dead, so if I can use the case and screen of my M3 with the guts of a newer laptop (like the Tecra M9), that would be the only way I'd ever buy a new laptop again.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
A couple of issues with widescreens:
* Laptop widescreens aren't really 'wide'. They're just as wide as the 4:3 screens they replace (give or take), but you get the bottom inch chopped off. You're losing height, not gaining width. Shortscreen is a more apt name.
* When viewing photo/image/pron pics, portrait photos are really second-class citizens. They get short-changed on screen real-estate.
Whining Dev: "Waaah! This 1280x1024 screen is too small! I can't see all my code on it!"
Manufacturer: "All right, fine, here's a 1600x1200 screen."
WD: "Wellll... okay, you live THIS time..."
DVD Watcher: "Hey! Why can't I watch my DVDs in widescreen on my laptop?"
M: "Fine, fine, here's a 1920x1200 screen."
DW: "Yaaaaay! And my desktop looks so much bigger, too!"
WD: "HEY HEY HEY! What the hell is this? My screen isn't tall enough now! I want more height so I can see more code!"
M: "But... but that's the exact same screen height you used to have and just bugged for a few minutes ago. It's the width that's-"
WD: "TALLER SCREEN NOW FOR I AM INCAPABLE OF RUNNING MY CODE EDITOR NOT-MAXIMIZED AND IT IS WHOLLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE FOR ME TO FIND OTHER USES FOR THE EXTRA WIDTH"
M: *deep sigh*
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Correct curly brace placement takes up less vertical space than incorrect brace placement.
(see K+R, or even Bjarne's crap -- when they agree, you know it's right)
The problem with most "widescreen" is that they aren't offering anything they didn't have before. I remember having a nice (at the time) 1280x1024 screen on a laptop a couple years ago, and it was great. Plenty of desktop real estate to work with.
Then someone came along with this "widescreen" garbage. Too many of today's widescreen monitors and laptops are something abysmal like 1280x800. Thanks for that. My horizontal size is the same as it was before, but now I have 224 less vertical pixels. Ooh, but it's a very rectangular shape now! That must mean it's awesome!
Seriously, of what possible benefit was that to me? The only people profiting from this are the manufacturers, who can now make something like 20% more screens with the same materials as before.
The screens I use now, both at home and on my laptops, are 1680x1050. I believe 1050 to be the absolute minimum vertical resolution acceptable, This resolution is more than decent, but I really wish manufacturers would stop pretending like they're offering something new and better over the traditional screen sizes -- and I really wish people would wise up and stop buying into it.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
I bet people who post preferring the wide screen are not talking about the 14" with 1200x800. :(
for 14" I would still have preferred the sxga+ screen
I haven't worked with a widescreen monitor yet, but I certainly don't want to step down from my current 1600 pixel vertical resolution. That means when I replace my current monitor I'll have to go from a 20" display to a 24" or larger one.
CAD is my business, and I just can't see any advantage to going wider in CAD. A 1:1 ratio would probably be best for a CAD display.
Anyway, I don't think the switch to widescreen will be too painful, but I'd rather stick with 4:3.
-Rich
that can flip vertically like this:
http://www.hardware.info/images/news/flexscan_s2031w_550.jpg
Every is talking about the usability of the screen and are forgetting that a laptop is one solid unit. I like widescreen because it allows for a full size keyboard while limiting the size of the unit in general. This allows for a smaller lighter laptop. I'd rather have my laptop fit comfortably in my bag and be widescreen then to have a monster square laptop
I have been coding on wide screen laptops since long time , and I am totally fine with it , actually vertical scrolling is much easier than doing horizontal scrolling on the non-wide screens. When you have a long function name which requires like 7 parameters , each on is a structure with pointers ...you will appreciate the wide screen.
Also as a developer I need to open lots of windows at the same time , so I need a longer taskbar
I definately prefer widescreen. It just seems like I'm able to use all of the available space on a widescreen, while I can't on a standard one. That means that even though the screen is technically smaller, I can fit more stuff on it.
I'm a developer. Widescreen also means longer lines of code before wrapping, so less vertical scrolling.
I'm not all that put out, honestly. I've got a 1680x1050 widescreen on my laptop, and if it were 1600x1200 I'd get a few extra lines of text, but big deal. My previous favored resolution was 1280x1024, so I actually get more pixels in both dimensions.
I can also watch 16:9 movies on it when I'm not coding, and I like that feature more.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Unless you are a 100% keyboard-driven user, thinking that taller is better than wider is a misguided idea.
OK, for sure, you can see more lines of code, but more most people using the mouse is the most inefficient way of interacting with their computer. Think how much worse that is when using a tall screen and you have to drag your mouse all the way to the bottom of the screen to scroll your window, to go back to the top to choose a menu, to go back to the bottom to click your dock/start menu/bar/whatever incarnation of GUI you use to go back to the top again to get another menu, as infinitum.
I vaguely recall studies done a long time ago (no link handy, sorry) that indicated a typical user spent (wasted?) more mouse-time in up-down mouse actions than left-right. Therefore a vertical screen will only exacerbate that problem further.
Amen! (to keep Slashdot happy ;-( )
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
One of my pet peeves about windows is that they layer the tool bars horizontally by default. They even use a menu bar per window.
then they put the widow dock along the bottom along with all sorts of crap. this chews up vertical real estate.
Most of the most poliched linux window managers make the same mistake. It's almost like you have to have virtual windows simply because they mismanage the screen realestate.
DSL linux's default window manager is a notable exception, and is very parsimonious about its use of screen area, presumably because it expected to be used on small screens of older machines.
Apple is better about saving screen real estate, since all windows share a single thin menu bar and the doc can be moved to vertical. Traditionally they use smaller icons and fewer of them so their toolbars usually are single width and thin (some notable exceptions however, like preview.app) Apple even puts the equivalent of tabs on the side of widows rather than the bottom (i.e. the window managers offer sidebars typically).
So perhaps it is not a surprise that apple was an early adopter of widescreen.
In my personal habits, I prefer widescreen because I feel like I can juggle more windows than with a vertical screen. But I get enraged when windows have all sorts of menu crap and tool bars that gobble my vertical screen realestate.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What you should be complaining about is the inability of Windows and many of the apps to negotiate a dual-monitor configuration.
It's long past time that Windows and its apps got some standards of behavior in the multi-monitor world.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I prefer the widescreen.
I develop primarily in Eclipse and find that the widescreen allows me to have a nice large editing window with several ancillary areas (outline, debug, file browser) in the extended part around what would be a 4x3 screen.
Personal preference, certainly, but it works nicely for me.
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
...nobody steals anything from you.
Previous lowest resolution was 1024x768. Now it's 1280x800. Look, ma, extra pixels on both side!
Mid range - before 1400x1050, now - 1680x1050. Extra pixels on the right!
High resolution - wide 1920x1200. Is there 4:3 laptop with comparable resolution?
4:3 ratio has its beginnings in the old days of television. Everything other - movies, photographs, books, are *not* in that ratio, but in something nearer to the golden ratio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio)
I recently started using a laptop docking station (with an external monitor, mouse and keyboard attached to it).
I use the laptop screen for email and chat and the 19 inch monitor in vertical (portrait) orientation for code, documents, browsing etc. Works great!
And I prefer a widescreen laptop for 3 reasons:
1.) wider keyboard
2.) don't have to scroll to see my code (this is relevant when you're forced to work with those dirty object oriented C++-derived languages like C# and Java)
3.) better for watch movies when nobody's around to see i'm slacking off
Two words: Line breaks
They not only make your code fit better on a narrow screen, they also make it more readable. Also, if you're indenting so far that you need the horizontal space, you really should refactor -- your function is too complex.
Although the old standard of 80 columns is no longer required for printing, it's still a pretty good idea.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Put the laptop on it's side. Now you've got the tallest laptop screen in the coffee shop man. Everyone will be all "Ohhh is that the new Mac laptop I heard about?"
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Now if you buy one of those sucky widescreen laptops you see at most big box stores, yah, they suck, way too little resolution.
But if you get one of the ones with the 1920x1200 widescreens (Like my Dell D810), then I've got no problem with them. They rock. (Assuming you have good eyesight or appropriate glasses/contacts!!)
Anyone who codes stuff with any complexity will realize that that horizonal space is far more important then verticle.
Properly Indenting you code take a lot of virticle space, as well ligning your data so it is easy to read. In other cases being able to have 2 code windows side by side readable is nice too.
Whe you see developers with duel or more displays they are laied out from left to right and not up and down for a reason.
It all depend on style not it is good for programming or it is bad I like short functions that are well spaced out so I can see all my informaion very easilly and Wide Screens help me with that.
Current interface guidelines like to reduce the change of horizontal scrolling. So wide screens are good for that too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...until you can decide on a standard! 16:9 or 16:10, or even that wonky 3:2 nonsense, until you can settle on a standard and stick with it, I'll continue to happily use my 2048x1536 CRT, which AFAIK no laptop screen has even been able to hit that resolution. It's nice never needing anti-aliasing at such a high resolution, which leaves more power for my graphics card to render polygons instead of smoothing lines. No, I do not play Crysis, as a game that needs three SLI cards to work at any decent rate must have had a still-born engine behind it, and an even more brain-dead programmer.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If vertical space is being lost, :)
It is meant to be T AND A, not T OR A
The user who prefers tall monitors for coding, to short (like myself) could always stand the laptop on it's side, and use a USB keyboard! :-)
In all seriousness, I use my monitor at work in portrait mode for this very reason. It's surprising how well IDEs work in portrait mode, almost like they were designed to be run that way. I find it odd that so few people run their monitors that way for work involving large amounts of text, like writing and programming. It's even great for the net, which also utilizes very large amounts of text.
http://www.unfocus.com/
I'm a developer, and got my first wide screen display about 6 weeks ago. I'd never go back. Most of my routines are fairly short, but because I tend to use DESCRIPTIVE names for things, my lines tend to be LONG - I actually scroll a heck of a lot LESS with a wide screen
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I always get the feeling that I have been cheated of an inch when using 4:3 monitor instead of widescreen. It's like the manufacturer chopped off the bottom of my screen. If I watched movies or even played games all day, wide screen makes sense. But for work, give me 4:3 monitors, thank you.
Why kick against the goads of commerce and progress? Why complain about that which you cannot change? You are flotsam on the sea of technology...
Besides, my MacBook is pretty and trendy and makes me look smart.
Actually, I've come to like the wide-screen format for placing my IM buddy list on the left and OSX dock on the right. It works nicely. Code? Yeah, that's mainly what I look at all day. The center area for content and side areas for BS is the Slashdot model!
Actually... that's the point. Since Slashdot began its been begging for a wide screen monitor. The OEMs are finally giving into the Slashdot imperator by providing Slashdot-optimized widescreen monitors!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Exactly, google doesnt index yahoos rds crap. And they don't index the virus host. AND in the search listing they warn you if a site is potentially virused. I always was pro yahoo because competition is good but.... at this point i'm just waiting for them to die off, hopefully a decent competitor will come up.
I was initially opposed to widescreen displays when they first came out because I saw it as nothing more than a marketing gimmick. "Oooh look, you can watch your DVDs on it!"
But when it came time for a new laptop, I didn't really have any choice but to get a widescreen display. Having used one for awhile, I now think they should have put widescreen displays into laptops sooner for two reasons:
1) In contrast to many of the comments here, I find that having a wider screen is great for development because it means you can have a couple of terminal windows and a browser open with less (or no) overlapping. This means less time wasted in flipping between windows which means greater productivity. This is the same reason I have a dual-head workstation at home. Anyone with a dual-head display is already effectively using one extremely wide screen.
2) From an engineering and usability standpoint, it makes perfect sense to make laptops wider than longer when you're trying to fit in more into the machine, including screen real estate. A wider laptop is one that can more easily accommodate a full-size keyboard and bigger screen while still remaining relatively compact.
for Apple to release a true "book-styled" macbook, which opens sideways like a book for reading, has a multitouch widescreen LCD display, and a full laptop keyboard with large trackpad (like the current generation macbooks).
So, I don't want extra vertical space in my mobile computer monitor, unless it's being used as a reader, in which case it will be on its side. That's what a docking station with an external monitor is for.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
It absolutely matters. As a software developer, I really need good vertical space. For a simple computer user, this impacts you even when looking at email messages in a folder. I personally will not buy a laptop that limits the vertical resolution to something like 800 pixels!
It's more than just the marketing that is pushing the widescreen. It's the ergonomic engineers. With the widescreen the keyboard isn't as cramped. Of course with a 10 inch screen you are still gonna be cramped but think about that 10 inch screen if the aspect ratio were 4:3. What would the keyboard look like if the screen bezel were tight?
And people are complaining about the amount of bezel on the Asus EEE laptop.
Now could they just decide on 16:9 or 16:10?
It is a common misconception that widescreen is any wider than 4:3. In actuality, widescreen is the same width, but the screen is _shorter_, so it has a "wider" proportion.
Thus, widescreen is really shortscreen.
Really, watch a movie made in widescreen and compare it to a 4:3 TV show. You'll notice that when there is a close-up of someone talking, the widescreen movie cuts off the top of their head , while the 4:3 TV show shows their head in full. Before anyone mentions pan-and-scan, I'll mention it's the worst of both worlds: the resolution is cut off in all four directions.
4:3 is a superior aspect ratio to widescreen; it's capable of showing more information in the same screen space. A show produced with a 4:3 camera has all the horizontal resolution of widescreen, plus extra vertical resolution. The name "widescreen" is such a misnomer; "shortscreen" is far more accurate.
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What is the actual percentage of the market for laptops who are developers? The summary almost makes it sound like it's the entire user base and that manufacturers are ignoring a huge and important market segment.
Ok, I was scrolling through the comments trying to find one that said this to make sure I wasn't going to dupe. The number is comparatively small when judged against the larger overall market for laptops. The whole issue seems like flamebait and trolling to me.
I will say this. I wish the industry would make font sizes actually standardized across any size display device. That's something that has ALWAYS bothered me, especially across OSs. Ten point type should be ten point type no matter how many dots per inch are needed to properly represent it on the display device! That, I think, is the real issue more than widescreen v. 4:3.
I really don't get the issues with widescreen that are brought up throughout this thread. It's the same number of vertical dots whether widescreen resolution (1920x1200, for instance) or 4:3 (1600x1200, for instance). I don't get how you would have to "scroll more" on a widescreen display. WTF?!?! Somebody is going to have to explain that one to me very slowly.
Years ago, I remember the "Radius" monitors that were sold as higher-end displays for Apple Macs. They easily rotated the 4:3 aspect screen between a "portrait" and a "landscape" mode, and as I recall, the computer received a signal that it was rotated (mercury tilt sensor in the display, I guess?), so it would automatically flip the video signal to match it.
Seems like that whole thing never really caught on though, and I don't see why not? I'd love to have a wide-screen notebook that would allow you to pull up on the display to extend it a few inches from the notebook, and then let the user rotate it to portrait mode to read full PDF pages at a time and so on.
If that's too much to ask, at least I'd like to see more desktop LCDs supporting rotation. My Samsung Syncmaster 213T did this nicely, except you still had to tell the computer you rotated it afterwards. (Is it THAT much to ask to integrate some sort of rotation support with modern video cards, so a display being turned can tell the ATI or nVidia board you need to rotate the video display 90 degrees?)
i don't know about you, original poster, but i have my eyes arranged horizontally, so a wider screen makes sense for me.
for those with their eyes closer together or overlapping, a more squarish aspect ratio makes sense.
and of course for the vertically-eyed, you have portrait monitors.
It's not that they can charge the same amount for less area, it's that widescreen TV panels have taken over the fabrication plants. No one makes 4:3 anymore - the suppliers have dried up.
Also, there is usually no less vertical space on a widescreen. The have higher pixel density instead. For example:
Standard SXGA+: 1400x1050
Widescreen WSXGA+: 1680x1050
...from a Lenovo account manager that gave a presentation in one of my classes 6mos ago, they can't find the glass for standard ratio screens from their suppliers. If they can't find the glass from their suppliers, they can't really offer that product line. I'm assuming that Lenovo is finally retiring the line because they ran out of their inventory of standard aspect ratio glass for their screens.
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
Really if the argument is you want X lines of code on the screen at once. The answer is simple, higher res wide-screen display + smaller font = X lines of code. My old non-wide laptop was 1024x768. my new widescreen is 1280x800. Guess what that means? More lines of code!! (slightly)
It's amazing how damn idiots are able to have jobs programming.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
While I prefer widescreen for using Cubase, I definitely can understand people wanting 4:3. Maybe they just like it that way.
In addition, long code statements won't fit on a narrow screen and having to scroll sideways to read your code PLUS scroll vertically is a major annoyance.
Just remember, if it won't fit on a screen horizontally, you're never going to be able to print it. Maybe I'm odd, but when I'm working on something complicated, or starting in on a new system, I like to print out major sections, take the print-outs home with me, and go through them lying down, taking notes on the print-out in pen. I try to mostly limit my lines to 97 characters so they will print in portrait on letter paper in 8 point courier.
My video card at work can flip the picture 90 degrees. I'm still trying to figure out how to hold the monitor up that way, so I can have a tall screen.
One thing to consider is that, as users, we've grown much more accustom to scrolling up and down, but scrolling left/right is still pretty awkward. Widescreen allows less left/right scrolling and keeps us scrolling the way we are used to (up/down).
Vertical space is a great asset, that why at both my home and work laptop docks I have a 19" rotated vertically. When your writing code, reading articles, etc you get the best of both worlds.
Personally I would rather have to scroll vertically to view more lines of code then have to scroll horizontally to view code that expands out past the side of the screen.
There are dozens of hot keys you can use to scroll up or down though code, but very few that let you scroll left to right. Thats the main reason why I buy 17inch wide screen laptops.
TruePunk | Games
I always pay the extra for the standard format screens. Manufacturers can sell a '20"' screen with hundreds of thousands fewer pixels when it's widescreen. I'd much rather have the pure screen real estate, especially for coding.
That's not a candle!
I do not have enough brain cells to understand a long method. This is a good development!
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
It is a common misconception that shortscreen is any shorter than 4:3. In actuality, shortscreen is the same height, but the screen is _wider_, so it has a "wider" proportion.
Thus, shortscreen is really widescreen.
Really, watch a movie made in shortscreen and compare it to a 4:3 TV show. You'll notice that when there is a close-up of someone talking, the shortscreen movie shows more of the image to the sides, while the 4:3 TV show cuts off the sides. Before anyone mentions pan-and-scan, I'll mention it's the worst of both worlds: the resolution is cut off in all four directions.
Shortscreen is a superior aspect ratio to 4:3; it more accurately matches the aspect ratio that humans see at, so it can fill more of your field of vision. A show produced with a shortscreen camera has all the vertical resolution of 4:3, plus extra horizontal resolution. The name "shortscreen" is such a misnomer; "widescreen" is far more accurate.
Does that help clarify things?
(Hint: any argument in which you can reverse all of the terms and have it still make sense is a bad argument)
Personally, I think wide screen is a lot less stressful on the eyes. It's a "natural" aspect ratio (for myself, and all my family). Also, don't we have a greater range of peripheral vision on the horizontal plane than on the vertical?
When I got a wide-screen laptop, I didn't lose ANY vertical space. How could I? The manufacturer would have to shrink the keyword/touch-pad/utility buttons because the space for these items mirrors the vertical and horizontal size of the screen.
Laptops can only (ergonomically speaking) grow along the axis of the keyboard. If you start increasing the height of the screen, you CANNOT decrease the width, so, you end up with a large, bulky, unwieldy, and otherwise unattractive "thing" that has no benefits over wide-screen.
Lastly, most users use a mouse-wheel to scroll or the page-up/page-down buttons. Where exactly is the page-left/page-right and horizontal scroll buttons? Makes more sense to scroll vertically than horizontally.
You lose a lot more vertical pixels than you gain in width going from std to wide. In the case of lenovo's 14" monitors, the dimensions are:
std: 1400x1050
wide: 1440x900
so you are only gaining 40 pixels in the widescreen case and loosing 150 in the vertical case. So for the same dimension you get less work area.
In the case of large widescreens you can maybe fit 2 documents side by side, but for laptops, I'd much rather have the 150 pixels vertical than the 40 wide.
Shorter methods.
When I was looking for a laptop for my wife, we were in Best Buy (yeah yeah yeah, pipe it to /dev/null, etc), and she said, "I don't want one of the short screen ones." Short Screen? I had never heard that before, being a tech guy and all. It's interesting how to someone who hasn't heard all the marketing hype, it's very obvious what it is, but to those of us who read the ads, it's a "wide screen."
By the way, I hate wide screens too.
Sapere aude!
I was looking to replace my 12" PowerBook as well, and when I saw the Air--I was crushed.
Thin, feature-less, and overpriced.
I would gladly buy another 12" Apple laptop, provided it's the exact same size as my 12" PowerBook. Why? Because it is literally the exact size of a sheet of paper, and fits in all the bags I own that are designed for literal "notebooks".
And to be nitpicky--can we get a black MacBook Pro? The whole look-like-another-silver-Lexus thing is bothersome. I liked my PowerBook when it came out, but now the brushed aluminum look is about as cool as it is in MacOS X--cool enough to be replaced. Yes, I know it won't happen, which is why this is just a personal nitpick. Otherwise, the MacBook Pro's are flawless in design compared to "PC" laptops.
(define (reduce f l) (if (null? (cdr l)) (car l) (f (car l) (reduce f (cdr l)))))
> but any developer knows that vertical space matters!
Yes but I still prefer widescreen for development as you can have two windows open side by side.
E.g. Sourcecode and compiler output, sourcecode and man page etc.
Also I prefer higher pixel displays so that you can have more readable lines of code through having a smaller font. Generally non-widescreen screens are either 1024x768 or 1280 x 1024, while widescreen displays tend to have higher pixel resolutions.
My 5 year old widescreen Dell laptop is 1920x1200 so in practice I got more readable lines of code on it than an old-style square display. Wierdly it seems harder to find widescreen laptops with such high resolutions these days though.
Why are ACs allowed to post links anyway? That's just asking for abuse. IMHO, link posting should be limited to non-AC posters. ACs should be there for people to express their own opinion anonymously because of fear of repercussions, not provide links to other people's opinions. AC posts should be the exception, not the rule, and they should be a lot more limited than real account posts as a result.
On the widescreen thing, non-widescreen laptops are going away because of people wanting to watch movies in the car or on airplanes or whatever. That's the only time I'd ever watch a movie on anything other than a large widescreen TV....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have a MacBook Pro here at work, and happen to have a Dell 2001FP LCD from a previous workstation purchase. I've found that turning the Dell display 90 degrees and telling the MBP to use the display that way works VERY well. I can now run 190x120 char ssh sessions if needed. 120 lines should be enough for anybody... ;)
The reality distortion field is working incredibly well in the real world. Witness the fact that apple market share is growing at an astounding rate, and that the company has market influence far out of keeping with its market share.
You don't WANT the reality distortion field to work - I understand that - but by any objective measure, 'Real Reality' finds Apple the company and Apple the product line 'Just Bippy' TM
Apple DOES know what their customers want, and it's showing in their growing market share. They have an OS that is making inroads into the corporate desktop market despite 0 effort on their part, and hardware that is as or more desirable than any other brand. Now, do they GIVE the market everything it wants is another question.
Do they produce everything that has even a whisper of demand in the market place, or have a model to meet the whims of every person who might, potentially , maybe want to buy a system from them. No.
Do they do this because they think they know better than you what you really want? No. It's a business decision - and if their balance sheet is any indication, its a damn good one.
In the Marketing world, apple exists on two planes. Computer as appliance - it just works, and Computer as status symbol - macs are sexy. Those two attitudes rely on surprisingly similar basis. For the appliance, the product line must be simple and uncomplicated enough for non-technical consumers to figure out what they need. It must also be simple and uncomplicated to set up and use. For the status symbol approach, there need to be few enough models to appear exclusive, with sufficient visual cues to easily identify entry level and 'aspirational' models.
To introduce too many models in either case muddies the waters and makes it too difficult to distinguish between the lines. Whether it becomes too confusing to determine which model you need, or too hard to tell if that guy in sales has a better machine than yours, it's bad for the brand.
Apple now has machines in all the major market niche's except the ultra-super-micro-nano-pico laptop ( and this, of course, is a segment less than two years old, with significant engineering challenges, and notoriously low margins. Even their most ardent critics will admit that this is not typical Apple territory ). In all the other market segments, if the apple offering doesn't meet your needs, then you can either go up the scale to the next offering, or go elsewhere. Many, many people opt to spend more than they intended.
Especially in its current state, Apple doesn't need to ( and indeed shouldn't ) blindly chase after every possible sale. To do so would be foolish and counter productive. The market is coming to them because they have the best offerings in many segments. They have a ( mostly ) well earned reputation for good hardware, and an OS and user experience that is - at the very worst - as good as anything else out there, an in many cases far, far better.
I find it somewhat amusing that you think that apple should abandon a strategy that has ( and is continuing ) to work very well for it based something as fickle and ephemeral as 'internet buzz'.
Internet buzz said Portals were the wave of the future.
Internet buzz said Apple couldn't bring anything to the telephone game.
Internet buzz said Push technology would change the world.
Internet buzz said no one would ever pay $.99 per track for DRM encoded downloads.
All this to say that Buzz frequently != good business decision.
I appreciate that you want apple to make stuff it doesnt. I still really want a headless unit between the mini and the mac pro. That doesn't mean I'm going to get it, and it surely doesn't mean that apple is being stupid by not offering it. It just means that I'll buy another mini ( apple wins ), or I'll buy a pro ( apple really wins ), or I'll build a Hackintosh ( still good for apple ), or I'll buy a dell and remember why I wanted to buy an apple in the first place.
People seem to be missing the fact that a widescreen ratio lets them fit a full sized keyboard more naturally. I don't know about you, but I rather code with a full sized keyboard and less vertical space than a small keyboard and more vertical space. If you need vertical space, get a 17" screen on your laptop; if you're lucky there will be a full number pad thrown in for good measure.
A wider screen allows for a wider, more fully sized keyboard. I would actually enjoy a laptop that had a full sized keyboard and only enough monitor to close over it.
>but the screen area is smaller, and thus they save more money.
The logical outcome of this will be the 1280x1 display showing Morse code.
This is when ed will make sense again, hey even edlin.
If you use the diagonal you can get even a 1500x1 display.
I challenge you guys to build an olph like this.
Damn, nowadays you could fit the thing into a slide rule.
You only need one key - the "any key"!
Then the line noise languages will make sense to you.
Je me souviens.
The 9:16 widescreen lends more to the desktop concept. Finally I can put things side by side, and see other apps when I am working in the foreground. I don't know if Windows users have the same experience, but on a Mac its the equivalent of having two screens.
>> The point is that Apple, once again, believes they know what their customers want and need better then the customers do.
> That's very presumptuous on your behalf.
Not really, it's a pattern of behavior I've observed through my 15 years as an Apple customer.
> How do you know what Apple customers want? Are you one?
See above. I only know what I myself want, and that Apple seems to think it's irrelevant.
> Are you in the majority? Does the majority matter?
Oh, I have all kinds of niche products I'd like to buy from Apple. The problem is that Apple typically gives you no choice, it's their way or the highway.
> Let the market decide, not your own opinion.
My own opinion is not irrelevant. It is a part of the market - you know, that "demand" you always hear about in "supply and demand"?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling a company what you would like to buy from them, even while you're buying something else they sell.
> Why do they sell so damned well lately if the customers don't want what Apple is offering?
I'm not saying people don't want what they sell; I'm saying they could sell more if they'd listen to what people ask for!
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Lenovo could just be purging it's current stock of Thinkpad laptops. According to this posting on Gizmodo, Lenovo is expected to release a refresh to the Thinkpad T series (T62) on June 3, 2008.
The above info in conjunction with the popularity of widescreen laptops could just mean that they purged the standard aspect ratio laptops before the widescreen models
Wide-screens are nothing more than a marketing ploy. You pay more and get less, end of story. The mass of consumers swindled again. Though admittedly this is largely due to their own stupidity.
Gonna have to concur, even though one more anecdote isn't that much more evidence, but just by chance I know quite a few people who work at Apple stores, and of course they and their families have plenty of Apple gear. None are interested in the Air. I have a MacBook Pro myself, looked at getting the Air, but didn't. The MBP's are plenty thin, and they have this strange legacy thing called an ethernet port...
There are valid manufacturing reasons to move from full screen (4:3) to widescreen (16:9) formats. In the old days displays were made from cathode ray tubes, which are cheaper to make in square formats. In the heyday of the CRT monitor, you even had it driving a change in aspect ratio from 4:3 to 5:4 (1280x1024) to get displays even more square.
With the advent and proliferation of digital LCD screens and projectors, it now becomes cheaper to build widescreens, since the fab kinda rolls them out at a fixed width. So you'd have a machine that could crank out parts for 1200 pixel wide panels, and "cut" and finish wiring them into 1600 or 1920 pixel wide displays. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce the "wider" display, whereas if you wanted to also make it "higher" you'd need a whole new set of machines.
Muhahaha
Widescreen is perfect for watching DVDs, and perfectly wrong for coding and word processing.
Can anybody recommend an inexpensive VESA mount that turns a regular LCD display into a pivoting display?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
When I got my Powerbook G4, I suspected this was one of the reasons it was aestetically pleasing. That, plus even if it has lower resolution, the aspect ratio is good for 2-up document display.
"the move to widescreens is clearly a selfish one"
Why, why, why most every boob view everything as an attack by "selfish" corporations.
> You, as a single individual, ARE irrelevant. I am irrelevant in this case too.
Nice. You should work in Apple's Customer Service department....
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
A consumer can "want" all day long, but demanding something as a single user is another story altogether. The sense of entitlement that most anti-Apple people carry in this forum is simply unrealistic.
That's right. Don't listen to the pusher robot; he'll say anything to get elected.
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vimdiff - the widescreen is essential!
(more scrolling = less productivity) = Fail.
Scrolling does not implicate productivity, actually, scrolling is more productive over section/tab selecting.
I'm an accounting student, and I love my 15" MacBook Pro. In two words, "Excel" and "landscape." The resolution is high enough that I can fit plenty in vertically.
For those of us in the writing and statistically intensive disciplines (soc. sciences, humanities, business, etc) the vertical real estate is pretty damn useful. I really prefer to use Word and Excel on standard resolutions (unless the widescreen is large enough) just so I can assess more of my document at once. For me, anything larger than 14" kills the portability factor in laptops, so multiwindow multitasking on the 15.4+ screens isn't much of an option. Widescreen is definitely better for movies, but I'd much rather watch those on a television regardless.
Luckily, I ordered my T61p a couple of weeks ago, so I have my new 4:3 laptop that should hopefully last a couple of years... during which time standard resolutions better make a comeback.
Though I do have a slight preference for 4x3, it's not a big deal. I can get my work done on anything. And most GUIs let you move vertical-space-sucking cruft to the sides.
Another thing: laptops tend to suck for developers anyway. I have never, in my life, touched or seen any laptop with a good keyboard. Most are pretty bad. That's a way more important issue than screen size.
Sure, when you get to your desk, you can plug in a good keyboard. But you can probably plug in a bigger monitor too.
It seems to me that the very nature of laptops is to get great portability at the expense of niceties. If you're using a laptop for development, I bet you're already hurting in lots of ways (but happy that you can work anywhere). Be glad you've got a screen at all. ;-)
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Years ago I kept my lines to 72 characters. Now I''l let them go much wider, to maybe 100 characters. they fet better on today's screens.
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[Yes, it's in French. Translations - A Vendre: "For Sale", Cheval: "Horse", Licorne: "Unicorn"
You're misinterpreting my point. I don't believe Apple should simply cater to the whims of a single user.
I do believe that every customer's opinion counts, and Apple ought to believe this as well. The problem is, they have consistently followed their own path and been perplexed when some customers dare to suggest that one size doesn't fit all. Apple makes great products. They just can't see that some users (often large groups of users) really do know what they want, and won't be satisfied just because Apple tells them how great the product is.
Apple has a long history of pooh-poohing the needs of its users, developers, and retailers. If you don't see this, I can't help you.
Read Andy Hertzfeld's anecdote What's a Megaflop? if you want to see how out of touch The Steve was with his customers' needs in 1984 - and in many ways still is today.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
I'm an independent developer too and I prefer widescreen both for coding and reading because it allows me to put two or three windows in X side by side. Even in text mode, widescreen means I can write and see very long lines without wrapping or horixontal scrolling (for the same reason I prefer widescreens for reading logs as I hate wrapped lines, and I can even see two logs at the same time on a single monitor). In graphics mode, widescreen allows me to put all the icons I need on a single toolbar, and still have part of the screen devoted to instant communication with clients, documentation, RSS, and other tasks. When widescreen first appeared in laptops I also was a bit critical of it, but when I realised that multitasking and prevention of horizontal scrolling is more important than vertical space, I became enthusiastic about them and now all my laptops and my desktop screens are widescreen. Since converting to widescreen, my productivity has increased.
16:9 is more natural - it fits your vision. I currently work using a Dell D830 laptop that runs at 1680x1050 on the built-in LCD and I have an external 1280x1024 LCD for my secondary monitor. Despite the fact that my primary screen is "widescreen" I actually have more VERTICAL room on it than I do on my 19" external monitor. With the expanded room I've bumped my SSH windows to 160x50 text mode as well. The argument that 4:3 monitors have more vertical space only matters if you actually have more pixels to play with. Even 1600x1200 doesn't have "more vertical space" than 2560x1200. The added room for additional windows is perfect for keeping lots of information up and ready to use.
1. You don't need a widescreen laptop to hook up a widescreen monitor.
2. Width vs height is not that big of an issue.If you can have both, most of us would take it.
So if you work on your computer and want the best setup, I would consider buying a mid-sized laptop that doesn't sacrifice performance, buying the cradle that goes with it, and hooking it up to a huge LCD monitor.
At home you have a desktop setup. On the go, you just pull out the laptop from its cradle and you've got everything in your briefcase without having to unplug any cords.
It's ridiculous that some laptops don't come default with matching aspect ratios for the monitor dimensions and/or they have to be modified to not be blurry. Luckily I found a quick fix for my co-worker's new Windows XP work laptop though.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I like the 16:10 format because I have a Pentax digital SLR that takes photos in the traditional 3:2 format. 3:2 = 15:10, so the photos take up most of the screen. Crappy 4:3 cameras leave big black lines down each side. The 4:3 consortium should dump the idea now and realize they are flogging a dead horse. Widescreen format is everywhere, laptops, desktops, TVs and the traditional photo format is a great fit. The makers of consumer digital cameras should adopt 3:2 and replace 4:3 as quickly as they can. Oddly most glossy print paper is still in 3:2 format requiring cropping of most digital photos. Good old 3:2 matches 16:10 nicely thank you. As for vertical scrolling, my 1680x1050 is better than my old 1280x1024, so all notebook manufacturers need to do is up the resolution a bit.
The Thinkpad X61 still comes in standard 4x3 ratio. (and the lenovo website still has the T61 listed)
I can confirm this; I've visited google sydney office once, and their staff mostly use 2x vertical widescreen monitors.
I also saw some desks with single 15" CRTs though, no idea what are those for.
If you deny link posting abilities of ACs then the terry wrists have won.
/. has moderation to nullify trolls, and suggesting that ACs are so massively censored for minuscule gains is short-sighted and counter productive.
If you believe that ACs cannot be trusted then you have the power to change your settings to mod them below your threshold. Any argument you can make for displaying AC comments that don't contain links is equally valid for AC comments that contain links.
Seriously though,
Most of what I do on a computer involves reading. My eyesight isn't so good, so I can't run at high resolution without getting a headache -- the text is just too small, especially on a laptop, which doesn't have the greatest screen to begin with. Keeping my text size constant and squashing the monitor means I'm seeing less of a page than I would with a 4:3 aspect ratio. I'm sure many people find it easier to have more windows open at once, but I find that most displays are still too small for that. On a 24" widescreen, sure, but 15 inches is too small as it is. Let me keep my non-widescreen, please.
Visit the
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It was posted by some douche that registered as Jack B. Nimple (1275372)
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
We should be a little more honest here, and call these laptops "shortscreen". You never gain extra area to the sides, you just loose it from the top. Also, the "it's better for DVDs" argument is nonsense: just add black bars to top + bottom in the rare occasions when using it for certain types of film. Even this isn't always true: I just bought a new laptop for video-editing, and specifically hunted down one of the last 4:3 screens, because the camera is 4:3, and because widescreen is idiotic when the subject is people. When you are trying to film one or two people (in dialog, or standing up), the best orientation is actually portrait mode - widescreen forces you to crop the top and bottom, and have wasted space on the sides.
Damn, I'm happy I grabbed my 14 inch T61p before it wasn't offered anymore!
The 4:3 screen gave me such a geek-gasm. 1400x1024 is amazing! The laptop looks a bit more elegant and sexier as a square than with extra widened body to accomodate wide screen.
I was so surprised that there was no other laptop maker that could give me:
-4:3 screen
-good graphics (FX 570M)
-two hard drive bays
-robust construction
Too bad its already getting the mobo replaced for DOA cardbus... but once I get a fully functional laptop it will be sweet!!
The problem is that the "widescreen" displays being offered are, by and large, no more wide than were your old displays. That's what ticks me off the most. 1280x1024 was a decent resolution a couple of years ago. But then "widescreen" came out and, oh, what do we have?
1280x900. Gee whiz, thanks! Since it's now clearly rectangular it's "wide", but all they really did was cut off one or two hundred pixels from your vertical rez. Exactly how did I benefit from this? Drives me absolutely insane. Finding laptops above 900 pixels vertical is quite a chore; I know, because I've spent quite a while pricing them out for work and I refuse to go below 1050.
I like my 1680x1050 screens just fine, but they still don't compare to the 1600x1200 screens of yore, which are nearly impossible to find these days. Sacrificing 80 pixels in the horizontal to gain that kind of vertical resolution is fine by me.
I realise everyone's needs and preferences are different, but I am so, so tired of manufacturers touting this OMFG WIDESCREEN garbage like it's the second coming, when in reality it's just as wide as it was before, and significantly less tall.
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When I got my 1680x1050 wide screen laptop I thought it'd be great! I'd be able to have 2 apps on the screen at the same time, no problem. Right?
I gave up on that. Is there an easy way in Windows to manage the space? Maximizing takes up the whole screen (go figure). Dragging and re-sizing every app I want to use is a pain.
It's be really nice to be able to 'maximize' a window and it automatically take up half of the horizontal space. MS Word + Firefox would be great on the same screen.
I dual boot, so multiple desktops in linux solves this problem nicely. The 'PowerTool' app for XP's multiple desktops is not good.
Any suggestions?
What about the Thinkpad X61 I just purchased? It is not widescreen. Either is the X300 which just came out recently.
Not gotta miss the 5:4's, not at all. Widescreen RULEZ!
It's not just laptops. You can find 4:3 LCD monitors online, but it's nearly impossible to find them in a retail store. Last year I went to three local large computer outlets, and found only one, which was a floor model. I was told by all of them that their buyers simply stopped ordering them. At one store (Best Buy) I was told that the Samsung 204bw (1680 x 1050 native) had a larger screen area than the Samsung 204b (1600x1200 native). Not even a calculator could convince him otherwise.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
My 3 year old Dell 9300 laptop has a beautiful 1920x1200 17" screen - I'm using it for work purposes (and reading slashdot) whilst at work, hooked up to my main XP compuber via Synergy. With Ubuntu it even runs pretty fast.
At home I do quite like the combo of 2x 1600x1200 20" screens and 1x 1920x1200 24" screens. My preferred font is Lucida Console 7pt in Windows, so I can fit quite a bit.
(Message to the OP: HTFU and get yourself a 17" 1920x1200 unit if you value screen real estate so much.)
ISO certified == THX certified
BTW, if you want rotation, how about Tablet PCs?
"Too many of today's widescreen monitors and laptops are something abysmal like 1280x800. Thanks for that."
The biggest problem with this is when running VMs in a window when the VM is running at 1024x768. I mean, subtract 768 from 800 and you get only 32 pixels.
They're not wide! They're less tall! http://twistylife.blogspot.com/2008/03/widescreen-is-theft.html
If you want more lines of code on the screen then reduce the font size, 8pt is readable.
This is only true if the widescreen-format is achieved by increasing horizontal resolution.
Usually though, the widescreen is achived by taking a regular screen and decrease it's vertical resolution.
I'd rather have a 1280*1024 regular than 1280*800 wide.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
One more thing - widescreen laptops are more easy to handle in cramped spaces, airplanes of cars are best examples.
And I find the keyboards in widescreen laptops superior to that of 4:3 models. If you need lots of display space, get a 17" laptop. They're feasible because they're widescreen - a 17" 4:3 display would be a joke.
Can we please stop whining for such small issues? It's unbelievable...buddy, you should be happy you have a nice job and a laptop to write your code on. It's does not really matter if you can't see 40 instead of 30 lines of code!!!
Frankly, I've not been thinking about this simple solution; while the movietheaters do the same to display their schedules here in Belgium. ...
I've got to test that for coding, now if only those monitor supports would be a bit cheaper to put 2/3 LCD's together with 1 arm
400 Euro to attach 2 monitors is outragious, knowing one 22/24" monitor costs about 400Euro too!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Widescreen notebooks that have screens large enough to be useable make the notebooks unwieldly long defeating the entire purpose of notebooks IMO.
OTOH reducing the the LCD size while maintaining the aspect ratio reduces the screen resolution to a ridiculously small/unuseable size IMO.
For desktops, I still primarily use CRTs as they provide much better image quality and lack the shadowing that I still see in all but the very best/most expensive (ridiculously so) LCD displays for desktops. Not to mention that in some of the LCDs, including some of the better ones, e.g. Sony I still detect what I find to be color discrepancies as well, which is some graphical applications that I use is VERY noticeable, although I always gave notebooks a pass on this as I never intended them to replace the desktops, just to be something good enough to use while travelling.
I suppose that I ought to stock up on enough CRTs before those get banned along with incadescent light bulbs, or at least enough of them to last until truly useful LCDs become commonly available at relatively reasonable price points, or at least compared to CRTs (I still prefer the trinitron design.)
I am one of those that do not like widescreen devices at all.
When we had to purchase a new television because the first one broke down, we were forced to buy widescreen because it was "the new standard" and the shop only carried these lame 12" portables that still had a normal 4:3 display.
Well, what a mistake that was. The widescreen tv fills our precious time continually adjusting it's display settings to suit that of the broadcast.. every bloody time the channel switches from commercial to commercial, from program to program, news messages, network messages.. every-bloody-time. I'm wondering when the tube will flake out because it is being constantly throttled so much!
And it's not just one channel on there, nooo. It's every bloody channel on cable, they can't seem to decide what image aspect to use anywhere! NOT ONE.
On a 4:3 screen we get black bars obscuring most of our view, and now on this bloody widescreen we also get those bars! how small do they want our view of a half decent movie to be?.
The same goes for computer screens and laptops especially! what the hell are those manufacturers thinking, reducing the vertical screen resolution to a laughable 800 pixels on some models? really, come on, tell me?
What a total nuisance, when your programs don't fit on that fancy schmancy widescreen display eh? have fun trying to get your mouse cursor BELOW the bloody taskbar, out of your screen's pathetic 800 or 900 pixels realestate to click that OK/Cancel/Nuke/Kill me Now button.
Doesn't matter if you use Windows, Linux or something else, widescreen just plain sucks!
Good luck with that!
They still ship the X61 with non-widescreen...
ghostbar page.
When I develop at 18pt font size I have a lot less code on the screen. This triggers me to write more concise classes, sit a little back from the screen.
As a result both me and my code feel more healthy. Try it sometime, your team mates and the maintenance programmers that have to deal with that code later will love you for it.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.