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Are Widescreen Laptops Dumb? (theverge.com)
"After years of phones, laptops, tablets, and TV screens converging on 16:9 as the 'right' display shape -- allowing video playback without distracting black bars -- smartphones have disturbed the universality recently by moving to even more elongated formats like 18:9, 19:9, or even 19.5:9 in the iPhone X's case," writes Amelia Holowaty Krales via The Verge. "That's prompted me to consider where else the default widescreen proportions might be a poor fit, and I've realized that laptops are the worst offenders." Krales makes the case for why a 16:9 screen of 13 to 15 inches in size is a poor fit: Practically every interface in Apple's macOS, Microsoft's Windows, and on the web is designed by stacking user controls in a vertical hierarchy. At the top of every MacBook, there's a menu bar. At the bottom, by default, is the Dock for launching your most-used apps. On Windows, you have the taskbar serving a similar purpose -- and though it may be moved around the screen like Apple's Dock, it's most commonly kept as a sliver traversing the bottom of the display. Every window in these operating systems has chrome -- the extra buttons and indicator bars that allow you to close, reshape, or move a window around -- and the components of that chrome are usually attached at the top and bottom. Look at your favorite website (hopefully this one) on the internet, and you'll again see a vertical structure.
As if all that wasn't enough, there's also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That's to say, most computer screens were the shape of an iPad when many of today's most common interface and design elements were being developed. As much of a chrome minimalist as I try to be, I still can't extricate myself from needing a menu bar in my OS and tab and address bars inside my browser. I'm still learning to live without a bookmarks bar. With all of these horizontal bars invading our vertical space, a 16:9 screen quickly starts to feel cramped, especially at the typical laptop size. You wind up spending more time scrolling through content than engaging with it. What is your preferred aspect ratio for a laptop? Do you prefer Microsoft and Google's machines that have a squarer 3:2 aspect ratio, or Apple's MacBook Pro that has a 16:10 display?
As if all that wasn't enough, there's also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That's to say, most computer screens were the shape of an iPad when many of today's most common interface and design elements were being developed. As much of a chrome minimalist as I try to be, I still can't extricate myself from needing a menu bar in my OS and tab and address bars inside my browser. I'm still learning to live without a bookmarks bar. With all of these horizontal bars invading our vertical space, a 16:9 screen quickly starts to feel cramped, especially at the typical laptop size. You wind up spending more time scrolling through content than engaging with it. What is your preferred aspect ratio for a laptop? Do you prefer Microsoft and Google's machines that have a squarer 3:2 aspect ratio, or Apple's MacBook Pro that has a 16:10 display?
I've thought the same. Most content is designed in a portrait orientation, including good 'ole paper. The benefit of widescreen formats though is in multitasking. I can easily keep a document open with a web page on the other side or any other application. On phones and tablets, typically you aren't multitasking so the portrait orientation generally works better.
If you can move the taskbar/start menu to the right side in a widescreen laptop like on XFCE, it's great. That being said for creating content like programs or a LaTeX document, it's actually better to have a longer screen so you can have two windows (code/results) side by side.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do they like it, or do they have no choice?
If you want a 3:2 laptop it has to be a Chromebook. You can run Linux, but they are not for everyone.
Everything else is 16:9, or 16:10 for Apple but then you have to put up with Apple hardware just to get that slightly taller screen.
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First modern laptop to have a different aspect ratio gets my money without question. They don't exist!
If you don't want that, don't get it. If someone wants it, good for them let them buy it. They are not wrong and probably not dumb. They just like something you don't.
If someone's preferred aspect ratio is 4:3, your solution is hardly feasible due to the lack of supply. That was kind of the entire point being made here, every damn thing has seemingly been infected with a 16:9 display. You're not exactly left with a lot of choices these days. Will someone out there make it? Likely.
You'll just be paying a premium for a "custom" design.
You wind up spending more time scrolling through content than engaging with it.
Engaging with content? That sounds awful, no thanks Farmville. I'll stick with scrolling through as I read it.
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I don't want it. I don't really have the option not to get it.
Same with the screens which are so glossy they cannot be used outdoors. It's very hard (if not impossible) to find a laptop with a usable mat screen.
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Yes, in theory ratios less wide than 16:9 (like the 16:10 the used to be popular back during the first wide screen LCD pannels for computer : 1280x800, 1600x1000, 1920x1200) give more screen estate for tool bars, etc.
(And despite all the criticism Ubuntu's Unity is otherwise taking, at least their idea of a side dock is definitely a good one to conserve screen estate in the vertical direction.
And why KDE-based linux distro tend nowadays to reduce the taskbar to a much thinner size.
And why "tabs and menus in the title bar" (like chromium and some firefox versions) are getting popular.)
The problem is that, for manufacturers, these resolutions are weird and unusual.
TV world has standardized on 16:9 a long time ago as the ratio for wide screen.
Keeping the same 16:9 ratio on computer monitors enables flat-screen panel makers to use the same parts in both TVs and computer screens, instead of needing to produce smaller separate runs of panels with "weird" resolutions just for the computer screen line of products.
That's why most of the common mass produced cheap computer screen use the same ratio as TV screen : reusing cheap TV parts.
Which is also the reason why most of those cheap computer screens also stick to common TV resolutions : 720p, 1080p, etc. and why until the recent "4k" TV resolution fad these computer screen were stuck at sucky low resolutions that CRTs had already surpassed a decade ago.
a.k.a the quest ion"Why are we stuck qith 1080p ? My CRT from early 2000s did already 1600x1200 !"
(you used to need to fork a significant amount for more expensive pro models to get beyond 1080p - simply because these used custom parts and not mass-produced TV pannels).
also, ob. xkcd ref.
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The current "wider than it is tall" format for laptops is based on the physical size/shape requirements of that human interface below it, the keyboard.
The default orientation for a tablet is "taller than it is wide", because it has no keyboard - add a keyboard and you'll typically find yourself turning the tablet on it's side.
It's not unusual for a developer to turn a large, high-res second display 90 degrees to have a two foot+ tall screen sitting on their desk like a tower, to allow for seeing huge swaths of traces, logs, or source code without having to scroll.
Please, explain to me the benefit for the average computer user of a display that is "taller than it is wide" - don't forget, many 'average users' do a lot of work in spreadsheets, an application that lends itself to a "wider than it is tall" display.
Ken
16:10 was a much better aspect ratio than 16:9 for just about any workload - including movies. It's all about marketing - the less square the aspect ratio, the fewer pixels you get for the same width (e.g. 1920x1200 vs. 1920x1080, or 3840x2400 vs. 3840x2160) and diagonal size, the two main metrics by which screens are marketed. The manufacturer gets to sell you fewer pixels, resulting in better yields, and less surface area, resulting in lower cost to them, all while getting to charge you a higher price because the numbers look the same or better. This is in part why now, after a few years of manufacturers having shaped the market by making 16:9 the norm, we are now seeing an increase in ultra-wide screens which take this to the next level.
If we called them shortscreens instead of widescreens, we'd see that the answer is obvious.
I personally think that the 16x9 ratio is for one thing....movies. People seem to have forgotten that to get work done, taller screens are typically better. Granted Word benefits from a tall screen while Excel might be best off on a widescreen.
matters on your use case.
I personally prefer LARGE laptops when I but them. I almost always go after a 1080p 17" widescreen.
People buy tablets instead of laptops.
It's long been known that if you make pages too wide the eye skips from line to line instead of reading across. That's why pages are portrait, it's why newspapers put text in columns.
They should be A4 portrait for work and reading, because that's the format people read in.
Video viewing is obviously a second use, and that needs to be HD landscape. Longer formats just creates black bars.
So the screen needs to rotate depending on use case.
The reason they're wide in laptops is because the keyboard needs to be wide and the clamshell styling means the screen protects the keyboard. Trackpads suck, and so they've been getting shrunk and phased out in place of touchscreens. Naking the keyboards less deep, and the screen aspect ratio has gotten wider and shallower to cover the shrunken keyboard.
It's kind of a sucky legacy format, but clamshell laptops haven't totally disappeared because Google's tablets largely suck with Android being optimized increasingly for phones (512MB stupid!) to the detiment of tablets. Chromebook/Android mashup failed. And Google will reshuffle the idiot who did that, ditch his 512MB 'Go' phones and hopefully Androids shortcomings will be fixed then.
I almost never use it outdoors, however I do have both lights and windows in my house, both of which are extremely problematic on most "oooh shiny" screens.
4:3 was a sort of "golden ratio" for computing. It's not just controls, either; ask anyone that does a lot of work in Excel or with databases or anything in a terminal where more viewable vertical lines makes life a lot easier. Ever since the transition from 4:3 to 16:9-ish screens as the standard I have been very unhappy. The diagonal on a widescreen has to be bigger than on a normal screen for the same surface area and the pixel counts on widescreen are generally lower due to the ratio. I love my 2560x1080 ultra-widescreen for Premiere and After Effects but the truth is that a taller screen would have been better than a wider one and rotating the widescreen 90 degrees just isn't a good option. When 1920x1080 started to get cheap I thought it was a really nice development...until I realized that I was sitting in front of an IBM 21-inch LCD monitor that did 1600x1200. Yes, there are 1920x1200 monitors out there (I owned one and loved it) but all the remotely cheap stuff is 1920x1080 at best, and if 4:3 monitors evolved the way widescreens have, we'd have 1920x1440 and 2560x1920 screens. That's a lot of pixel real estate, and while your 16:9 movie will have black bars, so what? If the monitor is the same width, the image will be the same size.
This is why us widescreen detractors like to call them "shortscreens."
4:3 was a sort of "golden ratio" for computing.
Golden for the manufacturers of screens who were able to sell you the two you needed side by side for multitasking.
ask anyone that does a lot of work in Excel or with databases or anything in a terminal where more viewable vertical lines makes life a lot easier
Can I add an opinion? Word-wrap sucks for code, and the vast majority of my excel tables are wider than taller. The only time I've pined for vertical space in Excel is when idiots use word wrap and write a frigging thesis in a cell causing the one row to take up the entire vertical space. The beauty of complaining about excel is that it really doesn't matter how your data is laid out, if you prefer more space one direction or the other, then transpose it.
Honestly I don't miss 4:3.