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Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays
beeudoublez points out a Google+ post by Linus Torvalds arguing that today's standard laptop display resolution is unreasonably low. He said, "...with even a $399 tablet doing 2560x1600 pixel displays, can we please just make that the new standard laptop resolution? Even at 11"? Please. Stop with the 'retina' crap, just call it 'reasonable resolution.' The fact that laptops stagnated ten years ago (and even regressed, in many cases) at around half that in both directions is just sad. I still don't want big luggable laptops, but that 1366x768 is so last century."
My 7 year old laptop had a 1920x1200 resolution and when I bought a new one a few months ago I had to look all over just to find one that had a 1920x1080 resolution.
Along with higher resolution.
I realize that this is a lost cause and all; but why would you endorse a 16:10(at least it's not bloody 16:9...) rather than a 4:3 for a laptop? For a tablet, sure, where you can change the orientation and turn your sprawling rectangle into a nice, readable, page-width reading surface; but a laptop, where the keyboard keeps you from doing that?
If virtually all laptop displays are going to be laid out as though they are used for nothing but watching movies it would be nice if they at least threw in some additional pixels; but do we have to give up the shape that is better for dealing with text in a reasonably sized package? Absurdly wide desktop screens are fine, because you can just make them larger, and treat them as multiple page-sized screens when needed; but laptops have space constraints to deal with...
How about 4K standard desktop resolution for 22" monitors? All this DPI fighting needs to leak over into desktops eventually.
Can your average onboard video card drive monitors at that resolution?
Actually, 2560x1920 would be better. But apparently more people use their laptops to watch videos than to do work.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How about 4K standard desktop resolution for 22" monitors? All this DPI fighting needs to leak over into desktops eventually.
It's called the IBM T221, with a 3840 x 2400 resolution, 22" size and it's been around since 2001, although the $5,000+ price when new put some people off ($600 to $900 on a certain auction site). Sharp currently makes a 3840 x 2160 panel (no electronics) for around the same price in sample quantities. Remember, if each pixel has 3 transistors (one per color) you're looking at 27.6 MILLION PARTS per panel, right now that means a lot of defects and a large price to cover the costs.
If you can afford such a monitor, you also can afford a separate graphics card.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's a shame you've been modded down. The answer is no, unfortunately. More so, there's also no current display cable standard capable of transmitting the resolutions needed for desktop monitors to be doubled up.
A few of examples:
The Intel HD {2000 | 2500 | 3000 | 4000} you'll find on pretty much all intel CPUs of late, and hence in 90% of desktop computers sold just now has a maximum framebuffer and texture size of 4096x4096. The road map for haswell and broadwell does not indicate this increasing. So for 27" monitors, where you'd want at least 5120x2880, that's simply not good enough.
Similarly, HDMI maxes out currently at 2560x1600, DVI at the same, and even Display Port at 3840x2160, so again – not good enough.
Right, it was years before LCDs matched CRTs for their ability as laptop displays... wait.
Jesus, split those hairs a little more. Did Samsung, LG, and Sharp bother producing these displays before Apple dumped cash into their laps? No.
It's not hipsterish, it's just annoying when you can only read a tiny amount of vertical lines for one file and there's tons of wasted space to the right unless you have two files side by side. Even then most setups I've seen have had multiple displays so the need to shove everything into one screen isn't necessary.
Yeah, just use your laptop sideways. Kids these days, you have to tell them everything.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
They are not widescreen, they are reduced height. When you look at them in this way you understand the complaints.
Apple now offers you two laptops with that res and higher. Yet instead of praising what apple has done, he says "stop with the retina crap".
He's praising the hardware and condemning the marketing term Apple applies to it.
(emphasis mine).
It's not a troll, it's the fundamental concept of Internet Libertarianism: any time the free market has decided that your preferences aren't widespread enough to be worth catering to, it was actually a secret cabal of statists.
Never mind that CRT monitors take up eight times the store shelf space of LCDs, or that the overwhelming majority of consumers genuinely prefer an LCD flat panel over a CRT, regardless if the CRT has better picture quality, or that every laptop manufacturer other than Apple has been on a cost-cutting race to the bottom for a decade now and that naturally includes the cheapest screens that will fit the size envelope. Oh, no, it's the environmentalists' fault that you can't buy CRT monitors at WalMart anymore, with their dastardly voluntary EnergyStar conspiracy.
I see what you've done there. You've taken the word "consumer" and inserted the word "sheep", inventing your own brand new word "consheepmer", in order to suggest that most people who buy things make their decisions based on the decisions of others, rather than carrying out their own in-depth research into all the options available. Well done, you should be proud of yourself.
Recommending an annoyingly-to-uselessly narrow display is not an improvement over using an annoyingly-to-uselessly short display.
In even the simplest non-power-user case of playing Facebook games, many of them don't even fit onscreen vertically on a 1366x768 laptop. Just the bog-standard stock layout of Windows taskbar on the bottom of the screen, and default maximised browser layout does not leave enough room for many games' meager display assumption, and sometimes fullscreening the browser (a rarely used hidden feature) doesn't even get it all.
Plus, laptop displays have been actively shrinking in the vertical dimension. The "standard" laptop res nowadays is a widescreen version of the circa 1990 1024x768, but the prior low/mid-range standard res at least used to be 800 pixels tall, with 1280x800. And yes, those 40 or so rows matter when you're highly constrained in that dimension.
Of course, the ThinkPad had a 2048x1536 15" option, but that's really not fair as it's a pretty exclusive upgrade. But it shows that the tech for decent-resolution portable displays has been around forever.
You totally missed the point.
The Retina display macbook was delivered with an updated OSX which could take advantage of the added resolution, without making everything unusably small. Coordinating those things to offer a desktop OS with a USABLE high resolution screen is, in fact, something to commended.
I have a 30" cinema display. It looks great under Windows where I can adjust the DPI. However, when you do adjust the DPI, there are an assortment of compatibility problems. Even big ticket apps, like Adobe Photoshop/Dreamweaver don't work right. You'll have dialog boxes pop up with missing controls. There are some "compatibility options" which can fix it, but then you're left with blurry applications. Or you leave the DPI alone and deal with uncomfortably tiny text and icons.