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?

Comments

Widescreen is crap.

[rantingkitten]

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.