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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?
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.
Vertical space does matter to developers. People even today walk by my desk and laugh at my twisted widescreen HP monitor. They can't possibly see the benefit. Then I drag over a pdf file of a specification document and can read a whole 8.5x11 sheet on that screen while coding on the other screen and they instantly see how well this size matches up.
Plus I am coding in C at work. Sequential code tends to have longer functions and thus you need more vertical space to see the whole thing.
A widescreen laptop is a joke. Laptop screens are too small to begin with. Sure, I like diff on a wide screen. But the majority of my work is not diff. Since a laptop screen does not rotate, I prefer the standard setup. It simply does not fit with the proportions I am used to looking at all day, which is a sheet of paper.
And watching a HD movie on my 15" laptop!?! Haha, what's the point? I'd rather watch it on something designed and comfortable for movie/TV watching.