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Like Smartphone Vendors, Laptop OEMs Are Increasingly Moving To Near Bezel-Less Displays (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the past few years, IFA has become a laptop show. It may not be the place where companies like Apple or Microsoft show off their flashiest hardware, but when it comes to the midrange, workhorse laptops that dominate the shelves at Best Buy and desks at schools, IFA is where you'll find them. That's why it's so interesting that there's been what feels like an overnight revolution in laptop screens at this year's show: bezels are dead, and IFA killed them. [...] Now, that wave is coming to laptops: Acer's Swift 7 and Swift 5, Asus' new ZenBook line, Lenovo's updated Yoga laptops, and even Dell's midrange Inspiron computers are all getting their screen borders whittled down. These new laptops are pushing the screen-to-body ratio higher than ever: the Swift 5 is 87.6 percent screen, while the newly teased Swift 7 checks in at 92 percent. And Asus' ZenBooks feature a new ErgoLift hinge design, which is (in theory) to improve typing, but it also cleverly hides the lower bezel so that Asus can claim it's up to 95 percent screen.
It drives me absolutely nuts that Apple is reportedly implementing bezel-less displays on every device BUT the one they should have done it on FIRST.
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*yawn* this is the kind of crap I'd expect to see on typical consumer electronics fanboy site
for something the size of a laptop screen there comes the point where the exact thinness of the bezel really doesn't matter; we've past that point in a prior year
We all look forward to the camera that looks up your nose. So keep it clean!
Apple killed the bezel a few years ago for all intents and purposes. Supposedly it was one of the things Steve Jobs felt most strongly about, though the technology was lacking in the years before he passed (RIP). Glad to see the rest of the world is following suit. Bezels are useless.
What a nice new laptop and now even more fragile device you got there.
Such a shame if it were to get so easily damaged and you didn't purchase our extended expensive warranty from one of our inconvenient authorized repair shops.
So frustrating would that be, so frustrating would that be.
What's the real use of having some millimeters more screen? Won't the panel break more easily?
For the camera, and fanboys will lick it up.
A smaller bezel means the laptop is physically less bulky for a given screen size. This means you can carry a 11.6" laptop as easily as an older 10.1" laptop, or carry a 13" laptop as easily as an older 11.6" laptop. (Granted, it also means less space for rechargeable batteries.) Conversely, it increases the screen size of a laptop that fits in a given bag.
... but will make a lot of users without tiny hands have to lug around larger external keyboards. I cannot work on a late model Mac without my typos keeping the spell checker working overtime or the shell giving me countless FNF errors. (Damned muscle memory.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
while it's nice that thin bezels help to keep the size down having a 4:3 or at least a 16:10 screen ratio would be a much better improvement
What is so great about bezel-less? What is the functional improvement?
MacBook Pros (amateurs) already aren't the best for attaching a privacy screen...
Another side benefit of these new displays is that you can't just get the LCD panel anymore for $50-100 when they break. Instead, you can only get the entire assembly which I've seen cost anywhere from $300 to $600+ if it's a touch-enabled display.
This is not consumer friendly. Manufacturers are watching how Apple rapes their customer base and desensitizes them to it, then the other manufacturers follow suit.
We seem to be moving inexorably towards devices that are just solid bricks that you toss in the trash when they stop working, and away from things that are serviceable. If we had Federation-style replicators that can recycle them as energy and make you a new one, great, but we don't, it's wasteful, and it's stupid.
Personally, I would love a bezel-less laptop but I can't tell you how many technically astute people I see picking up and carrying laptops by the screen bezel. Along with this, you have a lot less material to handle bending forces when the laptop is opened or closed. So, how are OEMs keeping the screens from being damaged through what has been up to now normal usage? I'm not sure if this problem gets worse if you take touch screens into account.
As for the camera issue, maybe now would be the time to see about developing technology for a camera to take images through the screen. I guess there would be the need to filter out what's on the screen. The big downside of that technology would the ability to put cameras into any screen, making personal privacy/security much more difficult to maintain (ie you would no longer have the option of putting a piece of tape across the camera).
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hahaha the majority jumped off a bridge. Thats progress!
If they are going with smaller bezels, it would be nice if they reduced the touch sensitivity of the outer 50 pixels or so. A semi-circle on the edge that is 10 pixels deep and 20 pixels high should NOT register as a touch.
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What a silly statement - IFA had no role in this *at all*. If laptops are going bezel-less, whether or not IFA even exists wouldn’t impact the timeline of the shift one iota.
Regarding the design shift itself... can’t say that I care. The bezels on my current laptop (2015 MacBook Pro) are small enough; eliminating them would only increase the screen size a small amount. And going truly bezel-less has some obvious downsides:
- Where do you put the camera? Keyboard pop ups are bad placement, and moving parts prone to breakage.
- If you actually use your laptop as a laptop on a regular basis, you’re putting a lot of stress on the screen panel when opening the device.
- The Notch.
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It's such a relief that consumer electronics companies are finally listening to what people want.
We don't care about being able to use standard headphones/headsets with our devices!
We don't care about battery life!
We don't care about durability!
We want our electronics to be as THIN as possible!
We want the whole surface to be part of the display!
So what if we have to spend $50 on new headphones (which now require batteries that eventually can't hold a charge)?
So what if eliminating the bezel turns the most incidental impacts into a $300 repair bill?
Nobody cares.
It's a bezel, bub!
I just HAVE to buy a new $800 phone so it'll get rid of the 2mm bezel. Can't have 2mm around the screen before I put it in the big ass OtterBox case.
Is to they break easier and more quickly. Any other utility they provide is simply anectdotal at best. A manufacturing burn and churn em...
The problem with bezel-less is that your eyes fail to accommodate for the distance. A bezel gives you something to focus on. Now for laptops with 16:9 displays, particularly the bottom bezel is an insolence: I'll admit that. No reason to have dead area there.
I have a Thinkpad T61 (16:10 I think) and a T420 (16:9) and one difference that is actually annoying on the T420 is that depending on angles there is a gap around the hinges that you can look through. That's surprisingly distracting with a reasonably lit table behind.
Bezelless would give me that effect on all sides of the screen. No thanks. Books have margins, and they have them for a reason.
If you have bezels, 16:9 to 16:10 ends up being the best ratio. If you look at a page of a paperback book, the area of the printed text is about 16:9 (portrait) or even 2:1. The surrounding margins bump it up to about a 3:2 ratio. Same for a printed page. The printed area of A4 ends up about 16:10, while the printed area of a letter-sized page is about 3:2. These are the aspect ratios the publishing industry has settled on as optimal for reading and viewing after hundreds of years of trial and error. It's only after you add in the margins that you get a 4:3 aspect ratio. Books and magazines whose text area is close to a 4:3 aspect ratio is typically broken up into two columns, because that aspect ratio is not optimal for displaying text (it's too broad or too squat).
So on devices like tablets and phones, the bezels substitute as a margin, and the best aspect ratio for the screen ends up being around 16:10. The 4:3 aspect ratio on the iPad is only best if you waste valuable screen space displaying blank margins on the screen. Why do that when you can just use the bezels to substitute as your margins? (Incidentally, margins are useful for holding pages in a book. But they were really invented so the page edges deteriorating over time and being eaten by bookworms wouldn't result in the loss of printed material.)
But as you move towards smaller bezels, suddenly you're forced to display margins on the screen so text and images don't get covered up by the hand holding the device. And the 3:2 and 4:3 aspect ratios become better.
And apple moved away from it in the end.
Bezel-less is really only a disadvantage on touchscreens that you have to hold (you wouldn't want it in a phone, for example). If you aren't holding it (or touching it doesn't fire an event), lack of a bezel is just fine. It anything, it's even a tiny improvement.
Dell started this trend in 2015.
if they get rid of the bezel then where am i going to put my sticky notes???
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At the end of the year, I'm getting out of IT after 21 years. I'm going to do something else and since I will not be writing shell scripts much anymore, I doubt I'll buy another laptop and run Linux. I'll keep my Raspberry Pi and likely buy another for side projects, but I'm switching over to an iPad with backlit keyboard case. I find myself not wanting to do any actual IT work at home anyway since my actual IT job is so stressful, when I get home I simply want to be a consumer.
hahaha the majority jumped off a bridge. Thats progress! (2)
I caught the audio cable I had plugged in while closing the lid on a 2 week old laptop. Was 1/3 the cost of the laptop to replace the screen. Besides the issue with easily damaging it with physical impediments, the screen also had a lack of rigidity due to the lack of a wider bezel which lead to issues with the display cabling over time. Near as I can tell, it is the actual connector on the glass itself and irreplaceable. Since the switch to 16:9 displays it has become impossible to find a replacement screen in that formfactor as well, since it was an unusual display resolution due to the low bezel formfactor.
The long and the short of it is that I *NEVER* buy portable computer hardware without at least a half inch and ideally 1 inch bezel around the outer three edges. With it, there is a much higher chance of catching any physical blockage before it damages the screen. Without it, your screen will be junk one way or another within a few years top, simply from the regular wear of opening and closing the clamshell. A related issue is the lack of a protective plexiglass screen on notebook devices. While it adds to the overall thickness of the device, especially for models costing 1000 or more dollars, it makes sense to do everything you can to protect the screen since it is both fragile and visibly critical to the use of the device. While spilling something in the keyboard will kill it just as quick, smashing things into the screen, from errant fingers, pencils, or elbows, to items like that cable mentioned above, can and do happen, and properly hardening the displays against that should be given higher priority. The fact that market differentiation has been trumped by me-tooism at both the bottom and top of the market really explains why companies have a hard time finding significant gains in sales figures without a major stumble by a competitor.