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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?
A laptop is the size it is to make it physically workable for human hands and eyes. Just because the electronics gets smaller doesn't make you hand smaller. The keyboard needs to have usable spacing. A larger size "box" of the laptop provides structural strength. That's why you pay so much for thin ones, it takes a lot more engineering to make a thinner box strong enough. A computer also needs some empty space to allow for airflow. There are reasons why things are the way they are.
It should be 16:10
golden ratio is about 1.61803
Probably will never happen. While I disagree with the thesis that there's anything wrong with 16:9 laptops, the market does tend to go in directions that have nothing to do with utility or usefulness. Or is someone out there selling $100-200 Android phones with three day battery lives and slide out keyboards, with a headset jack and two USB ports and an HDMI out, that's thick enough both support this functionality and not suffer cracked screens due to flexing?
When the "thin laptop" craze started in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was disappointed. Up until then the trend had been to create small laptops that were worthy desktop replacements. The Thinkpads came with three bays right under the keyboard allowing users to quickly swap drives and batteries. They were thicker than today's laptops (around 2") but were otherwise almost as small as a Netbook, and fit comfortably in a backpack or briefcase. But someone decided that flexibility and battery life was far less important than being able to use the laptop to cut tomatoes, and that was the end of that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.