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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?
Let's get it vertical!
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.
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A 15" laptop is made mostly by empty space.
A 15" screen should be no less than 2K. Most of them is instead less than FHD.
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I'm currently using a 16:9 screen with the Windows taskbar underneath, at the top the window title bar, the Firefox menu bar, a tab bar and the address bar. It does not seem tight at all.
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16:9 is a compromise.
Phones just expanded the screen to cover the bezels because that looks good, they didn't really think about the aspect ratio.
Laptops are often used for watching video, so 16:9 makes sense for consumer ones. The real issue with documents is that the screens are too small to have two pages side-by-side like you can have on desktop. The text is too small to read if you do that.
Many apps are badly designed and fail to take advantage of wider screens. Web sites are the obvious example, but things like office apps could learn a lot from image editors where the toolbars are traditionally on the sides.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
So the justification that a wide screen is dumb, is because the content isn't widescreen.... except it's general purpose computer and the content on the screen could literally be anything... It could be a video, that is the same aspect ratio as the screen... or it could a tall narrow stack of code...
So let's forget about content, because that could be anything.
let's look at form... what do we need for a laptop? A keyboard is key... those are wide and short, like 15:6 aspect ratio... we'll need a mouse interface, so we can stack that under the keyboard to get a slightly better aspect ratio... and then once we have that part built, we'll slap on a screen that will cover the whole thing.
Aw crap, people want a full keyboard, with number pad? well that's like a 25:6 aspect ratio... a touch pad isn't going to fix that up... we could put a lot of dead space in there by they want them smaller and lighter... we'll just make the screen wider!
And that's how laptops are designed, and if you don't like how a webpage looks on a screen like that don't buy a laptop like that or don't go to webpages like that...
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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It should be 16:10
golden ratio is about 1.61803
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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4:3 is better if you have two monitors, but widescreen is better if you are stuck with one monitor and trying to edit two documents side-by-side, diffing, etc. Essentially I'm saying that 8:3 is the ideal monitor, I guess ;p
Now why browsers put tabs across the top rather than down the side...
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I prefer a 16:9 phone over an 18:9 phone. I think the 18:9 (or taller) on a phone is a poor fit, and really want to have phone manufacturers start to bring out 16:9 premium phone. I really really really really really hate the screen on my Samsung S8+, and the only reason I have is because there was no other screen choice available with the phone features I wanted (the Samsung won out because it had a headphone port).
Anyway, I rant -- the question here is relating to 16:9 on a laptop. Personally, I'm happy with a 16:9 screen, so long as screen size is adequate. My last few laptops have had 17" screens, and I wouldn't buy smaller for myself. By work laptop is a 15" screen and I don't see the 16:9 screen as being a problem at all. I have 2x21" 16:9 monitors plugged in to the dock at work, though (so I use all 3 screens), and typically use a 21" 16:10 monitor at home with it. But I always use the laptop screen too, though typically just for reading emails.
Depending on what I'm doing, a bit more height would sometimes be nice (when reading code). Or sometimes more width (when having 2 documents open side-by-side on the same monitor). But on the whole, I've no issues with 16:9. I actually seems a good compromise.
I have a 16:10 monitor at home, and I don't really notice much of a difference from 16:9. 4:3, to me, is unusable these days.
(but I still really really want a 16:9 phone 6" premium phone again)
Just a square would be fine, and would allow for a decent palm rest as well as whatever bar at the top/bottom while leaving room for work.
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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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Can I just tell websites I have a 20:9 on my 16:9 so it'll push all the trash on the side of the screen out of sight?
for my clients i always always made sure that they ordered 19in 4:3 aspect ratio screens, because they do document editing (invoices) full-screen, and run a web browser full screen as well, switching between the two.
not even 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio screens make *any* sense - laptop or no laptop - when all you are doing is a single *BUSINESS* related activity.
the exception to that rule as i've discovered when using an Aorus X3 Plus V6 is: 3000 x 1800 resolution laptop LCDs when running fvwm2 with a 6x4 virtual desktops (a total of TWENTY FOUR virtual desktops) is absolutely fricking awesome.
on virtual screen (2,1) i currently have SIX 80x60 xterms stacked up 3x2 with about an inch to spare below them. those only take up less than HALF of the left-hand screen real-estate. to their right i have TWO web browsers open at around 1100x800 (chromium) and 1100x700 (firefox) below that. i still have 35 pixels below those two, to fit two time-displays (xclock set to HK/TW time and another one for GMT).
this does however mean that i am sitting approximately a maximum distance of 11 inches from the screen (with short-sighted glasses *removed*) otherwise it is flat-out impossible to read the text. surprisingly however you get used to reading insanely-small text... which is *supposed* to be "retina quality"... very very quickly.
message to product development management weenie types: not everybody is a mindless movie-junkie-zombie "consumpty-numpty"...
The only real choice for a tall/square Windows laptop is a Microsoft Surface.
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.
You know you can have more than one window open at a time, right?
Put your code editor on the left, and the browser you ultimately use to look things up on StackExchange on the right.
Hey, look - both are useable because you have a widescreen! How about that?!
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I have seen the vertical monitors used to great effect in certain applications - for example, I used to work in telecom, and the engineers tasked with reading call setup/takedown logs looking for problems benefitted greatly from having the entire call log on the display at the same time, no scrolling... but that is a special use case, most programmers I know work with two side-by-side windows on a widescreen display.
Ken
+1 for both of your points.
The entire laptop design world is focused on the "Oooh, shiny!" crowd and it sucks.
These are NOT TV sets.
No sig today...
What I prefer is as much of a screen estate as possible. A phone is used vertical, as PC and laptop is horizontal. A tablet could be used both ways.
I liked the 1920x1200 I used to have. I now have 1920x1080 and it is not that much different. I personally rather have 3 screens at 1920x1080 than one screen that is 5760x1080, but that is because I see each screen as a different workspoace. That way I can watch a movie on one workspace and still use different workspaces on different screens.
As I am not a gamer, I do not notice the difference between 1920x1080 and 4K. Others might, but I do not. I will also never say that others must work the way I do.
So the questions comes down to opinions and like assholes, everybody has one. Unlike assholes, I have more than one and do not think that a default aspect ratio is a solution for me for everything. Even my phone I sometimes use in portrait and sometimes in landscape, so the aspect ratio changes in a per user case.
At work I have one monitor in portrait and the other in landscape, because THAT makes me do my work better.
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> keep seeing people say that vertical monitors are better for coding. I say bullshit. If your function is exceeding 1080 points high, write shorter more self contained functions.
Agreed. A six-line function will very rarely have any bugs, and if there are any they'll be easy to find in code review and testing. A 12-line function is almost as reliable. A 200-line function normally has multiple bugs.
The reason is that human short-term memory can't hold and process more than about 6-12 items at once. Once you go past 12 lines, the programmer and reviewer have to mentally chop it up into multiple sections anyway, they can't mentally see the entire function *in all it's detail* at once. That creates bugs, and makes some of them hard to see.
Of course there are some exceptions, such as tables, lists of homogenous items.
As a long time hater of almost every turd Apple craps out, I'm going to give them some props here. 16:10 is in my opinion the way to go. It's perfect to split in half if you'd like to use two windows at a time. I often have source code open on one side and a result display on the other. Yes, I do multiple monitors like everyone else, but having two windows perfectly laid out on the main screen is still very useful. I do it every day. I'm using a decade old LG 30" panel that I paid through the nose to get when it was new. My side monitors are 16:9 because I couldn't afford to get two more proper 16:10 displays. How I wish they were 16:10 though. Also, as others have mentioned, you can rotate the monitors so they are vertically long instead of wide. This again is perfect for normal document reading full page. Yes, you can scale a doc to fit 16:9 or some other oddball aspect ratio - but it doesn't work out quite right and results in a frustrating experience. Anyone who thinks they like 16:9 and haven't tried 16:10 I highly recommend giving it a shot if you get an opportunity. I would lay down hard currency that you would change your mind after even a few days.
So, in this case, good on apple for giving their customers a better option. I still won't be buying one, but they did something right here for sure.
With a widescreen laptop, you get a numeric keypad. With a numeric keypad, you can play Nethack efficiently. What more can be said?
If you don't want that, don't get it.
How the fuck did this get modded "insightful"? Have you even been in a computer shop in the last decade?
-1 Ignorant is more like it.
No sig today...
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.
The matte screen option is often available for free. You just need to find a toddler who will do the work for you.
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There are a variety of reasons for widescreen laptops, here are just a few of them:
Keyboards - a laptop with a tall and narrow screen will have a tall and narrow keyboard, which will feel cramped... A wider keyboard is better for typing on.
Availability of screens - widescreen format panels are mass produced for tv use, they're cheaper and more widely available.
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Mostly empty for you, maybe. For me I always have a ton of tabs and can't read the text. Need to go by icon. There used to be an extension for Firefox called Tree Style Tabs that did the trick, but it doesn't work as well with the new extension framework.
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If you're writing a lot and/or reading a lot you want vertical space, because long lines are much harder to read than lots of shorter lines. If you're working with video or photos or with complex apps with lots of panes and tools around, a wider screen is better, since you can arrange your tools horizontally and if your tools involve lots of lists of things it's hard to stack them vertically anyway.
Since less and less people read and write a lot and instead consuming video content seems to be what people like the best, screens are getting wider and wider.
Personally I hate that, but it's hard to make your your voice heard in the market if there's only very little choice when it comes to 4:3 or 3:2 or even just 16:10 screens.
Good point. If the author is really upset that screens are not tall enough, he/she/it should stop sprinkling banner advertisements throughout the story. Clearly the available evidence shows this person does not actually care much about what they are writing about.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I wonder if the rectangular-pixel monitors were meant for video production, where standards used to include rectangular "pixels"?
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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.
I have a different take in that it doesn't really matter. Basically, who cares? Most of my work is done at my desks at work or at home so I have desktop PCs with 2 or 3 large monitors on each one. I also rotate one of the monitors 90 degrees so I can view an entire page of a printed document without scrolling. I lose a TON of efficiency trying to work on a single small laptop screen. Not saying laptops are bad tools (they're great) but worrying about whether 16:9 or 4:3 is marginally better kind of misses the big picture.
I do have and use my laptop when I need to travel or in metings but for most of the work I do there isn't a laptop made with enough screen real estate to really be efficient. Minor difference in aspect ratio just really aren't all that important. 16:9 or 4:3 doesn't make a meaningful difference in my work flow. What I actually need is the ability to open and use 3-4 (or more) windows at a time. For example this morning I had some work instructions I was creating, our inventory system, a tooling database, and a customer drawing all open at the same time and I needed data from each. Trying to switch between these documents on a tiny 15" screen would result in a huge negative impact on productivity for me. Now your workflow might be different and that's fine. Some stuff I do can be done very efficiently on a laptop - I don't need multiple windows to email.
Sure, just like glossy screens, which were so dominant for a while it was difficult to obtain matte ones. Thankfully that dominance has reversed itself slightly, but if that's your preference you're still out of luck a lot of the time. I realize some of these things are a matter of personal taste, but there are strong economic incentives for vendors to standardize on only one style regardless of the existence of a diversity of preferences. Pushing against that a little is a good thing. So, if people want 4:3, 16:9, or whatever screens, good. Variety is what I want in order to pick from it.
I know this will bother some people, but putting it another way, there are some things that shouldn't be standardized because what is "right" is not clear and is too much of a personal thing.
You'll want to remember why 16:10 existed in the first place. Movies were 16:9, and there needed to be room for professional controls.
16:9 didn't enter the computer space until computers were mostly used as entertainment devices instead of as tools.
Welcome back.
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 thought I was alone on this one. I can't stand these wide-screen displays on laptops or even computer monitors. The FEW times I watch movies on them, I don't care about the "distracting black bars" at the top and bottom. MOST of the time I'm on the computer, I'm doing WORK which means READING and WRITING. I prefer working top to bottom without having to constantly keep scrolling.
If I want to watch a movie or a show on the computer, I'm more than likely to plug in an HDMI cable and watch it on my 65" television, not on my 15" laptop screen.
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
the "ribbon" format for menus in Office many years ago. It was dumb back then and it's still dumb.
But who uses a computer to do any work anymore? Computers are media consumption devices, or more correctly, advertising consumption and surveillance/data gathering devices. Who cares where the users think the tabs and chrome should be located?
Paul Thurrott wrote an article about his love of 3:2 displays a few weeks back: https://www.thurrott.com/hardw... (Premium, requires membership to read the full article)
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I have a 16:9 and a 9:16 monitor on my desk. Most webpages, PDFs, etc are based on a column concept to mimic a portrait A4 paper, making the 9:16 screen ideal (also writing code as you said). However, most applications, games, and so on are written for 16:9. So I just move things between the screens as necessary.
Some years back I had a very nice laptop computer with a screen resolution of 1920x1200. But technology advances and I eventually needed to replace that laptop. So I started searching for something with the same or better screen resolution. And discovered that they simply did not exist anymore and the best that could be obtained at a reasonable price was 1920x1080. WTF!?!?! Only thing I could imagine was economies of scale and that all too many laptop manufacturers think that the only thing people use their laptops for was watching videos and actual productivity use was non-existent. And with that mindset, It becomes easy to imagine those brain dead idiots purchasing lots of 1920x1080 panels since "that's the resolution used for hi def video and no one needs anything more than that. Besides, they're cheaper."
I really miss the vertical space for dealing with text.
A lot of complaints when there is a solution.
Move the taskbar to the side!
I have moved mine to the right (I like the clock/systray more than the Start-button) after Windows 7 came out stealing more vertical screen real-estate.
Granted, with all useless ribbon-interface and moving to 16:9 there is less and less usable vertical space.
(Not to mention all websites starting to use "fixed" in their CSS for menus......but that's for another thread)
i am on the hunt for one of those rugged outdoors type of cellphone with physical buttons, no touchscreen, but it has a flashlight, and a BIG 10000 mha battery that can last a month before recharging
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Same with the screens which are so glossy they cannot be used outdoors.
Is this a big problem for you? Not being snide. I honestly cannot remember the last time I used my laptop outdoors for any meaningful period of time. I understand the problem if you wanted to but this just isn't a use case most people have most of the time.
I've been putting the Taskbar on the right side of the screen for as long as it's been possible to do. Part of it stems from using Linux in the mid 90'S and I would set up multiple virtual desktops and that's where I happened to place the controls for it. Then when I went to multiple monitors it made even more sense because it would place the start menu along the right side of one monitor and just to the left of the other. When wide screen monitors were sold it allowed me to make the Taskbar a bit wider, which meant I could put more stuff in it and still be able to read a bit of text.
I've been using tree style tabs for a very long time too. This places the tabs along the left side of the browser. With a 16:9 monitor I was able to make this wider to.
Perhaps the author should stop using a wide format monitor like it's a 4:3 and these will become non issues.
I suppose 16:9 works well if you are consuming or producing media in that format. However for most productivity apps like wordprocessing or coding, I would rather see more vertical pixels in order to display more and scroll less.
Yes.
If you're talking about 13" "laptops" then they are dumb to have widescreen.
15" is... pfft.. maybe acceptable. But 15" was small even under 4:3.
17" or higher or just forget about it, especially with modern stupendous resolutions.
The first ever ThinkPad had roughly a 10" screen. At 4:3 that gives you the same height as a 12.2" widescreen. Pathetic. But then that was the 90's and those things were new and expensive.
Selling something not-much-bigger nowadays is a con. Just advertise it as a tablet and have done with it.
Yes, I have a 17" widescreen laptop. Yes, I watch movies on it. Yes, I take it on planes and carry it around with me (have done for the last 10 years). No, it's not a big deal. But squinting at anything smaller is a complete waste of time.
Though I loved it when my (arrogant and self-absorbed) boss showed off his (literally) shiny new monitor about a decade ago, bragging how wonderful it is.
The inside joke in the company was that what he liked most about it was that all he could see in it was his own reflection.
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You are right. Since you do your work at home on a desktop PC with 2 to 3 large monitors, it doesn't matter. Lets go on to the next article.
No lets continue to fuss and argue over an insignificant design detail with no clear right answer which makes no discernable difference in our work flow and over which we have no influence. Much better use of our time.
Or did you think that laptop makers are eagerly awaiting a verdict about what to do from slashdot readers?
It was Hollywood movies that started with a wider format, and it reached the 70 mm film format and went for this wider format.
Cathode ray tubes and TVs based on them would like to show a circular picture if they can get away with it. The best they could come up with as a kind of circle doing its best to masquerade as a rectangle. Sony struggled so hard to make the picture tube with a strict rectangular picture. The shadow mask in color TV was absorbing so many electrons near the corner, accumulated charge and deflected the beam it was a night mare. Standard def TV based on cathode ray tube was nearly impossible beyond 36 inch screens.
With the hand held phones, it is so easy to go for wider format for video and portrait mode for text, it is evolving in that direction. Almost all the desktop monitor mounts lets you flip the mode. I use two monitors in landscape mode. But almost all my reports use one in portrait, for writing code and one in landscape to see the product/GUI.
If someone comes up with a clever clamshell for laptops that lets you choose tall or wide easily and quickly it would get some good market share.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You want a matte screen laptop? Two options: go professional or go gaming.
The choices for 16:10 desktop monitors is rapidly dwindling. I've always prefered 1600:1200 and 2560:1600 monitors to options like 1680:1050 and 2560:1440. Dell still makes some 1600:1200 and 2560:1600 monitors, but not many others do.
The advantage lining up a 2560:1600 and a 1600:1200 (oriented vertically) is that the screens align perfectly and you get a lot of real estate.
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.
Microsoft Surface devices (since the Surface Pro 3) are 3:2. There are many things I dislike about the Surface lineup, but the screen aspect ratio isn't one of them.
You can also get a Surface.
All the wide-screen laptops which I've tried had really stupid keyboards. The manufacturers seem to figure that as they've got extra width they'll shove lots of extra keys in at the side, and move standard keys around. I'm reduced to hunt-and-peck typing because as soon as I stop looking at the keyboard I start typing nonsense.
Give me a decent keyboard like on my Lenovo T420 and you can make the screen as wide as you like.
"Tabs are a couple of decades old now,"
What? How is this a criticism?
Explain to me why this sentence has any meaning in a criticism of screen formats? The age of a UI element has NOTHING to do with its utility (except, perhaps as a second-order validation: older UI elements must be doing something RIGHT to have been kept around).
Shoes are a millennia-old concept, yet we happily keep using them.
Amelia Holowaty Krales - whoever that is - is a dumbfuck. There are lots, and lots and lots of people who use even 13-15" laptops to watch movies, and - you know, based on those really-outdated organs our EYES and the really outdated bilaterally-symmetrical placement - horizontal format is a much better presentation medium in that case.
-Styopa
I love the numpad, for games, and data entry. I rarely would consider a laptop that doesn't have that feature. So Numpad means more horizontal width on the monitor, but not a guarantee of large size.
Simple solution: Turn your laptop sideways.
Now, I'm joking, but honestly, that's an option with phones, and it's frequently an option with desktop monitors (the one I'm looking at now does this). This seems like a great option, as wide screens are (or at least seem to be) really good for gaming and watching video, but tall screens are better for reading or editing documents.
The only problem, of course, is that on a laptop, you have a keyboard attached to your screen, and one of those orientations is going to be awkward to type on.
One solution would be a detachable screen that could connect at either of two sides. There is the possibility of misplacing your screen, but on the other hand, it should make replacing a broken screen far simpler. That seems like a pretty ideal solution to me. Don't know if there are any out there. If not, there should be.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Nope, if you displayed a 4:3 video, it would be stretched to a wide screen with rectangular pixels and looked distorted.
I was thinking of of anamorphic DVD, which stored at 720x576 pixels (PAL) or 720x480 (NTSC) - even when they are meant to be played back widescreen... they call this an "anamorphic DVD". If you were doing video production of anamorphic DVDs, you would want a video screen with rectangular pixels so that you could see "native" resolution at the correct aspect ratio. It's also possible that the panels were made for DVD playback and then repurposed when the expected demand didn't materialize.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah, I went out of my way and was willingvto spend a lot more money on a taller display in a pc laptop - you cannot even buy it. Everyone wants to do 16:9 and that's it, even on expensive woekstation machines. Would love 3:2.
I put my app bar on the left, and I don't run every window full screen. For this, the ratio is fine. I see no reason for a laptop to go over 16:9 however. The HD ratio is a practical standard to settle on. Mobile devices arguably should extend that to account for their notches, and I imagine that's what we're mostly seeing there.
Just put your laptop sideways and BOOM! You have a 9:16 display that's a much better fit for websites.
#DeleteFacebook
I had the exact same problem, so I got one of these filters:
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/co...
It wasn't cheap, but it fixes the problem exactly like it was done on the old monitors.
If you resize a window horizontally, it will reformat the content to fit the extra space, because the window manager knows how big the display is, and the application knows how big the content is.
I think you're mixing up "modern" and "historic" You see that's how things used to work a while back, but now almost every website is designed for portrait browsing on phones, and if your monitor is any wider than that, all you get is a ton of whitespace on each side of a very narrow content column.
And, if you're watching a widescreen format media (which basically everything is unless you're watching a VHS transfer from 20 years ago), then it naturally fits the display.
Unless you're on a modern mobile device, in which case you now have black bars on both sides of the "widescreen" image due to the 2:1 aspect ratios (or worse) of all modern phones.
Except for Slashdot, where giant ads that create massive whitespace on the right side of the comments section; but that's not on anybody but Slashdot - their shit CSS and apparent lack of enforcing ad size boundaries.
I see that Slashdot is the only website you've visited this decade. Because this is not "only on Slashdot" it is on the vast majority of websites, and it's not just due to ads on the sides, even without that poor formatting most sites still just put whitespace there because you dared look at the site on something other than a cell phone in portrait mode.
Oh no, applications and web sites have to actually pay attention and realize that all display dimensions aren't 1024x768 any more. Or, If you do have badly behaved content, you can have two windows next to each other because we also can have more than 512MB of RAM. Welcome to 15+ years ago.
The situation was far better 15 years ago. 15 years ago content would flow to whatever size and resolution you chose. 15 years ago I had a higher resolution display than I do now, and it was great, now it would be wasted on whitespace. The web used to display dynamically based on what the user's window size was, what resolution they were using, etc. No modern web "designer" allows that, they lock it all down to what looks best on the one and only display that they tested on, and won't let the content change otherwise.
I work with a dual monitor setup. One horizontal, the other vertical.
We also work in an environment where we work from home half the time, and work from the office the other half, at reservable desks. Luckily our company bought all monitors that easily rotate. I get the strangest looks from people when I walk in to the office and the first thing I do is rotate the monitor as I sit down, but it sure is nicer to work that way. (The horizontal monitor is the one built in to the laptop. It generally lives with outlook on the screen while I do all my actual work on the vertical monitor)
System 76 makes some models with very nice matte screens.
My Windows taskbar has been vertical, running up the right side of my screen, for probably a decade.
One of several reasons that Opera was my web browser of choice for several years was its native support for a vertical tab bar. I could have dozens of tabs open, and be able to see all of them, and read their titles. It was tremendously useful, while it lasted.
PowerPoint has started putting context-sensitive tools and controls on the right side of the screen instead of just at the top, and the slide thumbnails on the left.
Chrome now makes the status bar at the bottom of the window invisible - freeing up an extra line of space in the window - unless it has something important to display (e.g. when you're hovering over a link and want to see the URL).
Reading/comparing/referring to two documents side-by-side is pretty darned useful in a number of different contexts. (Of course then each application window has to have a sensible layout for portrait-oriented display, as well....)
Yes, it's an added burden for developers to have to consider how their application might be used on displays with different aspect ratios. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't do so, and especially not that they should fail to consider how to present their product on the most common format today.
~Idarubicin
The big problem with using landscape monitors in portrait orientation is that the sub-pixel anti-aliasing doesn't work correctly anymore. I'm not even sure you get vertical anti-aliasing when rotating a monitor (does any OS supports it?). Even if you do, anti-aliasing is needed horizontally.
#DeleteFacebook
Couldn't agree more about the glossy screens. I'm currently using a 2011 Macbook Pro, one of the last models available with a mat screen. Not sure what I'm going to do when it becomes no longer viable. There doesn't seem to be a decent aftermarket material you can apply to "de-gloss" a screen, at least not that I've been able to find.
Bah, get off my lawn!
Except durability. Mine has a four inch scratch in it where a cat merely stretched while waking up and caught it with a claw by accident.
One can not escape.
On my desktop, I always INSIST on a pivot monitor. That way, I can rotate to the most appropiate form factor (16:9 when in excel, or comparing two documents side by side, 10:16 when reading a spec or writting a document)
So, I do not care much if the monitor is 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10, but I also preffer 16:10 in my desktop.
Sadly, my current desktop monitor is 16:9, but is the only pivot one I could find at the time in Venezuela (is not like we have much choice here...)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
The thickness of the Laptop was needed to fit in all the parts. That is why it was so thick, modern laptops are far better at meeting the performance requirements of a desktop, then they were back in the late 1990's where a Modern Laptop is now normally less then a year behind a Desktop in performance. Back in the 1990's it was often 2 years behind. When PC's were getting Pentium 150mhz chips, top of the line Laptops were running 486 66-100mhz. These were not marketed or made as desktop replacements, but expensive desktop supplements. For the high paid CEO or consultant. Who needed a computer that performed good enough. But was no way near what you could get on a desktop at the time.
But inside these thing, where a lot of parts that needed vertical space. CPU with heat syncs, Accommodate 25 pin ports such parallel port, and serial. Batteries where big and bulky. The height was needed, but it created a lot of empty space. So they used that space for putting stuff in.
Today USB, takes up a lot less space, and the components are designed to run cooler, so there is less need for so much space, so we can get away with a thinner system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Try to push for an equivalent replacement by square inches or pixel count.
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."
Except that's not how the real world works. If I have a bigger physical screen on my desktop, I can get away with smaller fonts and controls which allow for more content on the screen. On a laptop with it's smaller screen, I have to use bigger fonts and buttons to have the same usability.
Not to mention that 16:9 is a horrible aspect ratio on the desktop too. Luckily for me, I have one monitor that's in portrait mode instead, but that's hard to do on most laptops.
That was kind of the entire point being made here
The point being made here (attempted), the headline in fact, is that widescreen laptops are dumb. They are not really, even if a lot of people don't like them. If you can't get your desired laptop screen ratio, that's unfortunate, but it doesn't logically follow that widescreen laptops are dumb. That's two-year-old illogic.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Careful, at this rate we'll reach that aspect ratio pretty quickly. Just imagine how the marketing will spin that "Super-duper-ultra-wide"! all the while saving them lots of money on manufacturing as they only sell monitors based on diagonal inches, not square inches or pixel count.
No, this is the one (and possibly only) time that Apple being about a decade behind the trends (as they usually are) is actually an advantage.
If you resize a window horizontally, it will reformat the content to fit the extra space, because the window manager knows how big the display is, and the application knows how big the content is.
I think you're mixing up "modern" and "historic" You see that's how things used to work a while back, but now almost every website is designed for portrait browsing on phones, and if your monitor is any wider than that, all you get is a ton of whitespace on each side of a very narrow content column.
The fix for this is for modern web designers to stop making sites that look like a fucking cash register receipt all the time. It's so bad, that when I go to the "print view" for a flight itinerary on United.com, it spits out something that's 3" wide and prints on 2-3 pages. For a print view, which I might want to, you know, print. On paper. That's not 3" wide ...
And, if you're watching a widescreen format media (which basically everything is unless you're watching a VHS transfer from 20 years ago), then it naturally fits the display.
Unless you're on a modern mobile device, in which case you now have black bars on both sides of the "widescreen" image due to the 2:1 aspect ratios (or worse) of all modern phones.
Which doesn't say anything about whether laptop screens should be narrower. I think this actually argues for phone screens being closer to 16:9 (or 9:16), so that when you rotate them to watch a movie, you get better screen utilization. (That's a difficult prospect anyway, since you might also want to watch a Vistavision 21:9 movie, which will give you top/bottom bars.)
Oh no, applications and web sites have to actually pay attention and realize that all display dimensions aren't 1024x768 any more. Or, If you do have badly behaved content, you can have two windows next to each other because we also can have more than 512MB of RAM. Welcome to 15+ years ago.
The situation was far better 15 years ago. 15 years ago content would flow to whatever size and resolution you chose. 15 years ago I had a higher resolution display than I do now, and it was great, now it would be wasted on whitespace. The web used to display dynamically based on what the user's window size was, what resolution they were using, etc. No modern web "designer" allows that, they lock it all down to what looks best on the one and only display that they tested on, and won't let the content change otherwise.
Agreed. Early on, HTML was used to describe the content and formatting of (mostly) text. That would be the "Text Markup Language" part of HTML. When designers started turning websites into "web apps", and forced them to look the same everywhere (with varying degrees of success), they took away a lot of the freedom the browser had to format the content for the view selected by the user. Now, since many designers target tall skinny phone displays, things look funny for wider "real computer" displays.
As others have said, a laptop needs certain things to function, like a keyboard that human fingers can type on. For me, this means that the minimum width of a laptop is about 12 inches (ideally 13-14", since I like to have a separate numpad). I only need about 9-10" of depth for the keyboard and trackpad, so the minimum screen size for a laptop that has the input devices I need is roughly 14" x 9", less some for the hinges. That's pretty close to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
IMO, it would be ludicrous for a manufacturer to make a 14" wide by 25" deep laptop just so it could have a phone-like aspect ratio. A 4:3 aspect could work, but that wouldn't make programming any better (no room for dual side-by-side editors), and it wouldn't make movie watching any better either.
- The Sigless Wonder
Depends what you're looking for. You're right that "normal" laptops don't. But I just switched my primary computer to a Pixelbook, 4:3 ratio, full Ubuntu linux, and overall a really nice little machine.
There are however a few downsides:
1) they are one of the manufacturers who think glossy screens are a good thing... hint, they aren't, they never have been, and I wish that fad would die!
2) some people will want a physically larger display, though I've been pretty happy with it (though it is only a 13" screen, the taller aspect ratio and high resolution help mitigate that size a lot as long as your eyesight is decent)
3) high end gamers won't be happy with the performance, but then again, not everyone uses those sorts of games.
But anti aliasing and the truetype etc suck big time in Remote Desktop anyway.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because supporting multiple sized screens is so haaaaard.
(We are user design experts, why won't they believe that we know what's best for them?)
Size==Function
12"
Apple's original 12" laptop was the perfect travel form factor. It would fly, fit an aircraft drop down table space and slip into any briefcase.
13"
Apple's new ~12" wannabe is meh...compromising
15"
Apple's high end laptop 15" 16:9 offering is function over form for POWER users in Film, Photography, Editing, etc... its essential
4:3 Monitors
Desktop word-processing applications pretty much suffice on the gold standard business portrait 4:3 format
16:9
Desktop human factors tilt the 16:9 form factor in favor of larger is better on the eyes, your workspace and workflow.
I can function on a screen the size of Apple's iPad mini with a Bluetooth keyboard but its like scratching out code on a postage stamp. My productivity goes way down, workflow drops and works space evaporates beyond browsing
So people have complained a lot about the possibility of laptops becoming more like iOS, running one app at a time...
Then you complain about a form factor that is purpose built to better handle applications running side by side. HMM.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
this particular monitor wasn't optimised for that ... I tried playing DVDs on them, and it was still garbage
That's because it would require noon standard software. If the screens were designed for that purpose, they would still only work for that purpose as a link in a longer chain.
hmmmmm The Screen Resolution on our Phones are Different.... Its the Laptops that are Wrong!
I remember there used to be plastic sheets that went the other way, but they were more important as screen protectors over that naked soft LCD plastic, rather than the hard plexiglass covers of the Unibody era of MBPs. I suppose it might be possible to find an adhesive matte filter, but you'd have to look around and probably have to cut it to size yourself. I really don't like the glossy screen when it reflects room light onto the screen, doubly so when it's the lighted keyboard being reflected.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Those of us who do actual work on a laptop have to suffer, just to please those lazy bums who want to watch movies that fill the whole screen.
When I had a job and a desktop computer, I turned the display to vertical (portrait) orientation. The Dell monitors had an easy pivot to do this. Much nicer to work on text, etc.
BTW, why do they always specify ratios as 4:3, 16:9, etc. It's hard to compare. Why not just reduce the fraction to a decimal? 1.3, 1.7, etc.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
16:9 has won, get over it. Just stop changing the number for the sole purpose of changing it. 18:9 smartphones are dumb.
But if you are NOT going to comply with the 16:9 standard, at least make it different enough. 4:3 would be fine, but don't do 18:9 or 16:10. The difference from 16:9 is not big enough to be worth not respecting the standard.
"If you don't want that, don't get it."
Please link me to a nice 4:3 monitor I can buy, or a nice laptop with those proportions.
You will find that they only technically exist. It is very difficult to get any monitors that are not very short.
Shiny screens look really cool when powered off in the store.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I agree with the sentiments in many other posts that the market is geared towards "ohh shiny" types. I want a 16:9 or 16:10 widescreen MATTE screen, thanks. That's why I have yet to replace my 2011 Macbook Pro. I don't need the glossy, protective layer as I don't want kids so don't need it baby-proofed.
I'm sick of companies trying to use pointless metrics to determine what consumers want... they only made giant phones in the last few years and then use that "data" as justification for only making those because those are "all that sold." It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's full of shit. (It's all bullshit folks, and it's bad for ya. -Carlin)
Also, regarding applications, I like tabs - but that's besides the point. I think I'm missing the point of this article.
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"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
What's distracting about a black bar that isn't distracting about anything else around an image? Screens are always surrounded by something. No-one complains at the movies before they find the ceiling too distracting.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There are plenty of cheap coatings available, but the last time I looked none of them looked to be good enough. However, I just looked again, and ran across Mobile Outfitters. which has matte coatings cut to size for most laptops. They also have kiosks where they apply it for you, but none near me. Even so, worth looking at when the inevitable happens.
If you need laptop for regular work: spreadsheets, word processor, internet, File exploring, etc: a more 3:2 format would be welcome. If you need laptop for video-realted work would make a 16:9/10 laptop ideal. A 16:9 laptop for regular work, such as the Dell I received from corporate has such high resolution that I have to tune it down to 1360 x 768 so I can properly see everything in the screen. The fonts are SO small it makes no use having such resolution and a 16:9 screen. Let's reason it.
and you still don't have the ability to swap out your optical drive (if you even have one) for extra battery.
I have a 16:10 display for my stationary computer and it's actually a lot nicer to work on than that darn letterbox opening wide screen that a 16:9 offers. It doesn't seem like it's that much of a difference but it really is.
It all depends on what you use the display for when it comes to what aspect ratio is best.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have a 16:10 at home too. It's nicer than the 16:9 monitors at work, but I'd take a 16:9 5k 27" display over any of them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What I really want in a laptop is NO screen- a keyboard and a projector that I can adjust to the resolution, size, and shape of the blank wall I find.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Give me a modern version of the late 2011/early 2012 Macbook pro, with the high resolution screen and a reasonable compliment of ports, and I'd buy one in a heartbeat. I know that will never happen, so I keep on trucking with my 7 year old laptop that still meets my needs.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
First modern laptop to have a different aspect ratio gets my money without question. They don't exist!
Yes, they do: the MS Surface Book has a 3:2 aspect ratio but they are not cheap (unless you compare them to a mac!).
Would love 3:2.
Then have a look at a Surface Book - they have this ratio. I looked at getting one but ended up going with a Dell since they had not updated them for a while. With the new updated version, they look very good.
Surface Book is also 3:2. I prefer greater height for most things, and when on video I just cast it or ignore the bars.
I need a decent keyboard on my laptop. Keyboards are wider than they are tall. That is it really, seems pretty logical to me.
?
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.
I did a side-by-side comparison with a matte and a glossy. I found that the areas I couldn't read due to glare on the glossy screen were roughly similar to the areas I couldn't read due to contrast being washed out on the matte. Other people's experiences may differ, but I'm happy with glossy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Honestly, if I could get large, hgh resolution monitors in 4:3 or 3:2, I would.
The problem is, the availability just isn't there.
As such, I'm compromised on pretty much all laptop purchases.
Yes, there's the Surface, but the Surface is compromised in ways that make it a sub-optimal choice for me.
For my desktop, I wound up simply buying 3 27" 4K monitors, rotating them into portrait mode, then merging the screens.
The result is actually a bit less than 3:2, but it makes reading EMINENTLY less "scroll-happy" than a widescreen.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
16x9, commonly 1920X1024, may be fine for viewing widescreen videos but it's a poor geometry for getting actual work done. This has been true for as long as the geometry has been common, regardless of whether it's a laptop or a desktop. (I don't count tablets because there's not yet a good system for content creation through hand gestures.) At the default font, you often can't view a full page of text or a full web page, having to rock the page back and forth while you're working. This is ludicrous. The geometry is made for watching movies, and that's not the primary purpose of a PC. Or, arguably, a laptop, although I bet more people are primarily content consumers on laptops.
1920X1280 monitors are available, and I find them a lot more useful. You can see an entire page of text, or an entire web page if you don't have too much crap at the top of your browser. I don't know offhand if 1920X1280 laptops are available.
This has been true for a long time. Really, it's just now being noticed?
4K shook things up a little, as now even though the geometry is still sub-optimal for non-video work, at least there's enough real estate to get work done. I don't have a 4K tv -- I don't think it's that important. But I do have a 4K monitor on my primary workstation.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
4:3 makes a lot more sense for document editing and web browsing, which is what most people spend the majority of their time doing.
Widescreen ratios are great for movies and games. But I sure wish I could still buy a 4:3 monitor for all the time I spend doing things besides watching movies and playing games.
I like a wide laptop because it gives me a wide keyboard. A 4:3 display means a cramped keyboard.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah - my point was you were probably shipped what was essentially leftover junk bought at fire sale prices. The special purpose didn't justify the hardware's existence and nobody bought it for its intended purpose.
I like 16:10 even for desktops, and it irritates me how hard it is getting to find them.
I think that this get into a larger economic problem. You're a market that isn't being served because companies don't believe it's profitable enough to do so.
Are they correct, that it's not profitable enough to build 4:3 laptops? Maybe. Who knows. There are logistical issues like standardization and developing the supply chain, but to some extent, these decisions are based on what a bunch of marketing people guess people will buy, and in what numbers.
First, that marketing calculation could be wrong because the marketing people make a bad guess. Maybe a lot more people would buy 4:3 screens, and the market research is leading people to a bad estimate. Second, maybe very few people would, but it's because the market is making bad judgements. So maybe there really aren't many people who will buy 4:3 screens, but it's because those people are wrong and making a bad decision.
But there's also another component of it: What do you do about the small markets that nobody is serving because it's "not worth it". Let's say the people who like 16:9 screens are perfectly right and smart, but either you're wrong, or you have different tastes, or you using your screen for a different use. Is there some way that our economic system is failing if that niche market isn't being satisfied?
I know some people are going to think that's a stupid question, on the logic that capitalism can't be wrong, and that if a niche market isn't being served it's because it's so niche that it shouldn't be served... or something like that. I'm just not so sure. I think you could argue that it's a failing of capitalism, at least our traditional view of capitalism. The success of so many Kickstarter campaigns is evidence that there are a lot of these niche markets where there's significant demand not being met through traditional financing methods.
And yes, I'm sure someone will point out that Kickstarter exists within our economic system, so bla bla bla, whatever.
What I'd like is a screen that rotates into portrait orientation, kind of like what you'd get if the iPad had a second lightning connector on its long side, except with a real, full-sized keyboard, a trackpad, and the ability to run real Mac apps instead of the watered-down apps that are available for iOS. That way, when I'm working on something vaguely page-shaped, I can have a tall screen, and when I'm working on something that isn't, I can have a wide screen.
I think the 16:10 aspect ratio is a pretty ideal screen size, because it is only slightly less than ideal for a wide range of uses, some of which would be better with a more square ratio and some of which would be better with a wider ratio. For example, when watching TV and movies, it is roughly midway between 16:10 and 4:3, so both old and new content look acceptable. I wish actual widescreen TVs were built that way.
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Yeah, I agree.
But it was pretty smart and avanguard of him to come to that logical conclusion already two years ahead of us!
Don't you think so?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Considering that the 16:10 I have is a 1920x1200 it's better than a 16:9.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I won't buy any desktop display or laptop less than 16:10.
I want wide. I also want tall. I'll take 4:3 over any of the wider choices.
When I'm watching video, wide is fine. When I'm programming (or any other kind of creative writing) I want lots of lines visible, so tall is better.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
> But does a 200 line function have more bugs than 17 12-line functions calling each other
Yes, significantly so. Because when the author or reviewer are looking at it, they HAVE to divide it into chunks that are no more than twelve lines. That's about how much human short-term memory can hold. In the 200-line function, each chunk uses arbitrary variables also used in other chunks, chunks that are no longer in short-term memory.
By dividing the chunks explicitly, on purpose, you decide which variables get passed where and make that explicit in the function call.
> Sometimes multiple function can make code harder to understand.
Once you have a dozen inter-related functions, that's a class or library. Your software then uses that class, and the three short functions called by main() can be understood (reviewed, debugged) separately from each of the library functions.
This argument was around 10 years ago when 4:3 screen laptops were still available.
16:9 are cheaper in several ways.
You get bigger numbers for marketing with lower screen area. 1280x1024 is a bigger, more expensive screen than 1280x768. 1600x1200 is similar to 1920x1080, but the numbers are much smaller.
Laptop widths are dictated by keyboard size too. To fill out a standard laptop width with a wide screen means you can have a smaller screen. The laptop base doesn't have to be as deep to match the screen either.
Ditto! Though it's really showing it's age, compared to the much better battery life of newer portables.
I have used 4:3, 16:10, 16:9 and 21:9. I prefer 16:10 because :
1/ It suits best my workflow (all windows maximized and vertically stacked).
2/ On laptops it allows for "bezelless" design and I hate big bezels. Unfortunately for me only Apple has 16:10 displays and I do not use Apple laptops because running Linux on those is real pain.
Yes, 16:9 Is a dumb aspect ratio for anything other than video or video games. But, then that's all some consumers care about.
I personally have a 4:3 display at my desktop, a 3:2 display on my surface pro, 3:2 ratio for all photography gear, and a 4:3 display on my latest android tablet.
It's not to please the lazy bums who want to watch movies.
16:9 laptops means smaller, cheaper to produce laptops.
For the same screen width, there is less screen area and fewer pixels. Cheaper and cheaper.
Screen width is determined by the laptop width, which also needs to accommodate a keyboard.
A 15" widescreen is wider than a 15" 4:3, allowing a more comfortable keyboard layout while also being cheaper. The backlight doesn't need to spread as far either, so the diffuser doesn't need to be as complex.
The base can also be smaller to match the screen, meaning the it's also cheaper and lighter.
"Watching movies" was the excuse. Cheaper is the reason.
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This was debated 10 years ago. 16:9 was NEVER the right ratio for computing, it was simply easier for the manufacturers to produce one aspect ratio. Using the HDTV AR as as reason for productive work on a PC was always stupid.
something that is missed in all of this is field of vision human eye vision is wider then it is tall the amount of effort on the viewers part to move the focal point of your vision is less side to side then up and down ( a large angle change will regardless of orientation will require some pan and scan ). This is why media has been moving this direction over the years. Maximum use of para central vision and maximum use of peripheral vision. The best way to look at it is siting to close to a screen or getting a TV or screen that is to large. You work harder and the experience is not better. As a connoisseur of odd screen resolutions 1600x1200 1920x1200 2560x1440 and now 3440x1440 I can hands down say wider is better at the correct viewing distance. I got 3840x2160 4k monitors to replace my 1920x1200s after holding out for years for a taller resolution and hated the screens not because of the height but because of the size to resolution 28 inch 4k is BS if you are over 12 years old. I upgraded to a 3440x1440 and its been the best viewing experience I can remember and the bigest screen upgrade I have seen since I went from a 1024x768 CRT to a 1600x1200 lcd. on laptops the wide screen was also the only thing that allows for larger screen sizes like 17 inches a 4,3 17 inch would be unbearable, and would never fit in a bag.
Why are we still having a discussion on screen size at all? Electronically painting a screen in some fashion is something we've been doing since the 1800s. Let's move on.
I'd rather portable computing drop the screen altogether and give me high resolution augmented reality. Preferably, it would render in my eye so that the highest resolution would always be concentrated on the highest resolution portion of my retina. I'd also prefer it to have some resolution spread throughout the field of view.
Then, if I won't to continue to pretend I'm looking at screens, no problem. I can virtually place screens of whatever size I want anywhere in my environment. Even floating in the air around me. Or, perhaps I'd prefer virtual sheets of paper that I could pick up and move around that just happen to be able to show live images in full color.
The point is, we spend vast resources incrementally improving a hundred plus year old approach that is already alright. Why not freeze it where it's at and shift the R&D to an approach for the next hundred years. There are so many billions involved in each new generation of displays that I'd bet it wouldn't take long to break free of displays being physical things. And now that I put it that way, I guess we've been using the same tech since we started painting the walls of caves. Really, let's move on.
on virtual screen (2,1) i currently have SIX 80x60 xterms stacked up 3x2
For those of us who start having eyesight problems, and would prefer that going worse (staring all day at tiny letters will degrade your sight further rapidly), tiled xterms are a very bad idea.
I instead use fairly big font on maximized terminal, 10+ tabs on every monitor on every workspace, and switch between them (with two terminals visible at once because of two monitors).
But that means the physical aspect ratio matters -- ie, anything worse than 4:3 would leave me with an useless narrow "wide" strip. The primary monitor is vertical, but 16:9 is unfit for rotating thus it needs to be 4:3 (3:4) as well.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Agreed! I keep my Precision M6400 going because of the 16:10 aspect ratio (and also the RGB-LED backlight).
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I initially agreed when the first 16:9 screens first starting coming out and becoming popular. I poo poo'd them, and instead bought a nice 4:3 for my previous build. However obviously since then everything is 16:9, as is my newer build, and now I have a nice 4:3 collecting dust, and multi-monitor setup is not only hard, but also weird to try and have a 4:3 and a 16:9 at the same time... I'm usually pretty good at guessing trends, but I got that one wrong. I figured it was really only good for movies, and I don't really watch movies on my computer. 16:9 had some relevance when I had to physically link my computer monitor and flat screen TV together along with a IR remote for media center... However now that is even obsolete as there are a ton of other options like Plex out there now.... Seems the defacto now for video games as well, which I thought would initially be reluctant to move off the normal resolution range...
I use my iPad to browse, so it's easy to rotate. Menus stuck, so I use Vivaldi on my 16:9 - and a mouse gesture takes all the tabs n stuff away (but not fullscreen). Maybe it's your OS succinct, not the display. I personally think laptops suck. I have a great cheap easier to switch bits ATX and the rest is tablets.
When I ran Windows at work (I'm a Linux guy) I kept the start bar on the right side. This made the main part of screen more reasonable in aspect ratio, and let me see more of the tab text. If you can accept that then the wide screen is not so bad.
J