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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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
*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!
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.
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.
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
Until you crack the display from a simple bump.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
What is so great about bezel-less? What is the functional improvement?
"Tougher" means little. Materials are strong, or hard (Mohs), but rarely both. Making glass harder makes it more likely to shatter if there's an impact. It's more likely to crack. Which is why you see so many people around with crazed screens. It's true that a lot of engineering effort has gone into improving glass, but it's still a terrible compromise. Glass is a poor material for covering a solid object which needs to withstand impacts with hard objects.
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.
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.
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.