Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
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.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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...
> 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.
With a widescreen laptop, you get a numeric keypad. With a numeric keypad, you can play Nethack efficiently. What more can be said?
I don't think it is an issue with esthetics. But an issue of what we think a computer should look like.
A typewriter with a TV on top.
TV's have switched to wide screens, and so have Computers to keep up with the look of a typing device with a TV on top.
A vertical display laptop could be designed to look just as futuristic and objectivity beautiful as our current laptops. The real issue is that people will not like it, because Monitors have copied the display of TV's, TV's copied what Movies show, Movies have been designed to viewed in a landscape mode. (Craning our neck to watch movies would be painful). As we have been evolved to see things mostly on the horizontal axis. As something will more likely attack us in the same plane we are in, vs something attacking from us from below or above.
Also the problem is these interfaces have been designed based on a Paper layout, which each page is vertical, although the books when open gives us a horizontal view of two pages.
I myself would prefer to see a 2:1 display, where full screen apps will be multi-column. and/or applications can run side by side without those stupid horizontal scroll bar appearing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
16:10 long predates Apple and was the widescreen monitor standard before HDTV came along. 16:9 replaced it for economies of scale, not for function. Apple simply retained the better format, it did not pioneer it.
3:2 is largely the same as 16:10, so it's not as though Apple stands alone here. 16:9 is an inferior format for computer display, although for the desktop it is now moot due to 4K and huge monitor sizes. For laptops there's really no question.
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.
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?
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You want a matte screen laptop? Two options: go professional or go gaming.
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.
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.
I do. I've got a proper desktop computer with a 40" screen for use indoors. One of the main reasons I like having a laptop as well is so that I can spend time outside on a beautiful day, even if I want to be working/playing on the computer.
As it is, I pretty much have to sit under a dark canopy of some sort, out of direct sunlight, if I want to be able to see the screen.
Man I wish those Pixel Qi transflective screens had caught on.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...
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 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/
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.