I've been saying this for ages. the ONLY reason that phones now have that stupid 2:1 aspect ratio is that they can claim a larger number on the marketing side, while paying for a smaller one on the manufacturing side. It's not "better" in any way.
"ultra-wide" monitors are the same thing. "Look I at this 25 inch ultra-wide monitor!"... "you mean the 32 inch monitor with the top cut off but asking the same price?"
"many average users do a lot of work in spreadsheets"
Really??? I don't buy that. Sure, there is a subset of people who work in spreadsheets a lot, but I doubt they're more prevalent than the subset that works on the web a lot, and almost all websites these days are formatted for tall and narrow making a portrait monitor ideal.
Most Chromebooks also have that preferred aspect ratio.
My main computer at home is a Pixelbook, full Ubuntu install, good aspect ratio, works well. Only downside is the mirror they used where the monitor should be....
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)
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.
So if that's truly the case, why is it that about the smallest TVs are in the 42" range, meanwhile the largest monitors are in the 32" range? If they're using the same display panels, you'd think the overlap between TV sizes, and monitor sizes, would be quite prevalent.
I'd love it if that were actually the case though, because I can buy any TV at about half the price of a similar sized monitor, so I'd love to find a good 4K TV in the 30-40" range to replace my dying 32" QHD monitor.
Phones just expanded the screen to cover the bezels because that looks good,
No, they didn't. They actively made the phones both narrower, and taller. Not just filling the bezel areas. There's only one reason I've been able to find for the current trend of 2:1 aspect ratio phones (or worse), and that's simple marketing. A phone that now brags a 6 inch screen can have fewer square inches of actual screen than one that bragged a 5.7 inch screen before. It's win-win for the manufacturer, they get to claim a bigger number in marketing, while paying for a smaller one in manufacturing. Of course it's lose-lose for the end customer who now has a screen that's too narrow to do anything, while too tall to reach top to bottom with their thumb while holding the screen. And one where the normal video format leaves black bars on both sides of the image.
they didn't really think about the aspect ratio.
You give them far too much credit. I'm willing to bet that's ALL they thought about (maximizing a marketing number while minimizing a manufacturing number)
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.
Simple fix on desktop. I have a portrait 9:16 monitor on my desktop. It's ideal for most web browsing as you don't waste all that white space on the side of every web page and loading documents with a full page on the screen at a time finally looks natural. On laptops and phones on the other hand, you're pretty much just screwed one way or the other.
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.
These sorts of systems, have been well known for ages now to be a high risk for damaging equipment, most of them release with such force that they can do a lot of harm. As a result, many data centers, and other similar businesses have moved away from them to avoid exactly this sort of incident. A popular alternative right now is water mist, despite what people immediately think, these have actually been proven to be safe around electronics when properly designed and deployed.
I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. It's a better phone in almost every way to any phone on the market today. (processor is a hair slower than the newest phones, but I'd never found it slow at all, and it's hardware feature set was so far beyond any other device you can buy now as to more than make up for it) But it also hasn't had a security patch in a long time, and several high profile security exploits have come out since the last one. As a result I decided to "upgrade" to a new phone. I miss the large screen on the Note4 (all the new phones quote larger numbers for screen size, but due to the 2:1 aspect ratio have fewer square inches, and less usable space as it's too narrow). I miss the IR transmitter on the Note4, I miss the removable battery (I was on my 3rd battery, something not possible on modern phones), I miss the MHL video output (very few phones have any wired video output capability anymore, despite that it used to be near ubiquitous) I miss the textured back that didn't require a bulky case to simply be able to hold on to.
But I also knew that I couldn't reasonably hold on forever with the vain hope that someone releases decent hardware again some day.
Phones have a known replacement cycle of approximately 2 years. Computers have a known replacement cycle of more than double that time. Ergo, it is not surprising that more phones are sold than computers. It doesn't mean people prefer to do computer things on a phone, it just means that people replace phones more often.
Statistics without context may be great for trying to manipulate opinions on the internet, but they certainly don't prove anything.
You weren't there, so your attempt to rationalize that my driving was poor is laughable.
I can 100% guarantee that anyone who drives differently has been rear-ended many times, and been involved in many road-rage incidents. You can't stop on all roads all the time, and drive on highways at under 5km/hr and not get in trouble.
There is no possible way to drive and actually get to your destination if you assume everyone around you has a death wish.
As for "advanced driving qualifications"... sure... talk all you want. We won't go down that road as I feel no need to explain the various qualifications that I have, but suffice it to say that my license is of a significantly higher class than the average driver on the road.
Except it clearly does not do what the person wanted to do otherwise they would have been requesting a tablet solution rather than the laptop solution that they specifically asked for. Tablets do not do everything most people need them to because the lack of a physical keyboard is usually a big problem, and the add-on keyboards that you can get for various ones both push the price of the tablet higher than the Chromebook and are nowhere near as useful as a real built-in keyboard. Add to that the fact that they're limited to running only Android or iOS apps, rather than the full Suite of applications that the Chromebook can run and you'll find the most people very quickly run into a problem. I know quite a few people who have a Chromebook as their only computer, I don't know anyone who has a tablet as their only computer.
Because this is low earth orbit instead of the current geostationary system for satellites latency shouldn't be much of an issue, calculations done for this up thread put the latency for a round trip ping at about 8-12 milliseconds which is effectively nothing when you look at the grand scheme of things. In fact, depending on how they want to route packets, you could actually get decreased ping times when reaching servers on the other side of the planet, has signals actually travel faster through empty space than they do through copper wires are fiber optic cables. (Though my suspicion is that they'll try to get your signal out of space and onto fiber and copper as quickly as possible likely negating that particular benefit)
My suspicion is that the 800 satellites is to deal with the low data caps, you don't need that many satellites to cover the Earth as we've seen with the Iridium system. So it must be that they need this many to be able to handle the usage they're expecting. So I'm not sure the data caps are likely to be a problem. That's said, cost seems highly likely to be an issue because I can't imagine this endeavor being cheap. my best guess is that this will compete with the current satellite internet providers who are fairly expensive for slow speed high latency connections with low data caps. Those providers do however still get business from many people who simply have no other option. If they manage to keep the cost not much higher than the existing satellite providers they will probably see a lot of business due to the significantly lower latency, higher speeds, and more bandwidth.
That said I am really suspecting that musk wants to put these in his cars to give them a permanent internet connection I don't think he's happy with the current LTE solution.
There's a reason people choose a laptop over a tablet, and a Chromebook has all of those advantages at a much lower cost as well as in a smaller size. It's also far more relevant post at hand which specifically asks for a laptop solution.
Explain how this is less useful than a tablet (presumably running iOS or Android as those are the dominant players in that space) Even without installing a full linux distro, you still have chromeos AND android. so right away it's more useful than a tablet, and it only goes up from there with things like a full keyboard, and the ability to install another OS if you so desire.
The primary purpose of an airport is to go to other far away places. Those places don't have to be in the small handful of backwards countries that require removing laptops from their bags.
SoCs have their place. Inside another computer isn't one of them. They're great for embedded applications, IoT, etc, etc.
The best you can hope for putting an SoC inside another computer is a very expensive solution, that is full of potential security risks (after all, that's exactly what Intel's management engine was). The only way to mitigate those security risks is to make more and more of your system accessible only to the SoC, and not to the main processor, as long as there are any firmware programmable devices common to the 2, you have a security risk that potentially negates all the effort that's been done to build the separation in the first place.
There's a solution to that. Move to a country with sane airport facilities where you don't have to take your laptop out of your carry on for no apparent reason. (And yes, I live in such a place)
Then use YOUR laptop. Not your employer's laptop. Why do you think your employer would pay extra for the work machine so that it can include a personal machine for you in it as well? It doesn't benefit them at all, but does have significant risks for them, as well as adding significant costs.
If you want to do personal stuff on a machine, bring a personal machine.
Major corporations who buy their employees thousands of business laptops a year have no reason to spend extra money to also buy the employee a personal laptop in the same case.
Most of these companies have policies explicitly forbidding personal use of their work devices for this reason. The company has no incentive to give the employee a free computer for personal use. From their standpoint it is the employee's responsibility to provide their own equipment for their own personal use. It is also in the employee's best interest as they can avoid any appearance of impropriety.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost every laptop is widescreen, very few laptops have a numeric keypad. I'm not sure the 2 are really related.
We have a winner!!!!!
I've been saying this for ages. the ONLY reason that phones now have that stupid 2:1 aspect ratio is that they can claim a larger number on the marketing side, while paying for a smaller one on the manufacturing side. It's not "better" in any way.
"ultra-wide" monitors are the same thing. "Look I at this 25 inch ultra-wide monitor!"... "you mean the 32 inch monitor with the top cut off but asking the same price?"
"many average users do a lot of work in spreadsheets"
Really??? I don't buy that. Sure, there is a subset of people who work in spreadsheets a lot, but I doubt they're more prevalent than the subset that works on the web a lot, and almost all websites these days are formatted for tall and narrow making a portrait monitor ideal.
Most Chromebooks also have that preferred aspect ratio.
My main computer at home is a Pixelbook, full Ubuntu install, good aspect ratio, works well. Only downside is the mirror they used where the monitor should be....
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)
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.
So if that's truly the case, why is it that about the smallest TVs are in the 42" range, meanwhile the largest monitors are in the 32" range? If they're using the same display panels, you'd think the overlap between TV sizes, and monitor sizes, would be quite prevalent.
I'd love it if that were actually the case though, because I can buy any TV at about half the price of a similar sized monitor, so I'd love to find a good 4K TV in the 30-40" range to replace my dying 32" QHD monitor.
16:9 is a compromise.
Phones just expanded the screen to cover the bezels because that looks good,
No, they didn't. They actively made the phones both narrower, and taller. Not just filling the bezel areas. There's only one reason I've been able to find for the current trend of 2:1 aspect ratio phones (or worse), and that's simple marketing. A phone that now brags a 6 inch screen can have fewer square inches of actual screen than one that bragged a 5.7 inch screen before. It's win-win for the manufacturer, they get to claim a bigger number in marketing, while paying for a smaller one in manufacturing. Of course it's lose-lose for the end customer who now has a screen that's too narrow to do anything, while too tall to reach top to bottom with their thumb while holding the screen. And one where the normal video format leaves black bars on both sides of the image.
they didn't really think about the aspect ratio.
You give them far too much credit. I'm willing to bet that's ALL they thought about (maximizing a marketing number while minimizing a manufacturing number)
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.
Simple fix on desktop. I have a portrait 9:16 monitor on my desktop. It's ideal for most web browsing as you don't waste all that white space on the side of every web page and loading documents with a full page on the screen at a time finally looks natural. On laptops and phones on the other hand, you're pretty much just screwed one way or the other.
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.
These sorts of systems, have been well known for ages now to be a high risk for damaging equipment, most of them release with such force that they can do a lot of harm. As a result, many data centers, and other similar businesses have moved away from them to avoid exactly this sort of incident. A popular alternative right now is water mist, despite what people immediately think, these have actually been proven to be safe around electronics when properly designed and deployed.
I sort of just did...
I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. It's a better phone in almost every way to any phone on the market today. (processor is a hair slower than the newest phones, but I'd never found it slow at all, and it's hardware feature set was so far beyond any other device you can buy now as to more than make up for it) But it also hasn't had a security patch in a long time, and several high profile security exploits have come out since the last one. As a result I decided to "upgrade" to a new phone. I miss the large screen on the Note4 (all the new phones quote larger numbers for screen size, but due to the 2:1 aspect ratio have fewer square inches, and less usable space as it's too narrow). I miss the IR transmitter on the Note4, I miss the removable battery (I was on my 3rd battery, something not possible on modern phones), I miss the MHL video output (very few phones have any wired video output capability anymore, despite that it used to be near ubiquitous) I miss the textured back that didn't require a bulky case to simply be able to hold on to.
But I also knew that I couldn't reasonably hold on forever with the vain hope that someone releases decent hardware again some day.
Unfortunately for spacex, their headquarters isn't in low earth orbit. Though I'm sure it's in the plans.
Phones have a known replacement cycle of approximately 2 years. Computers have a known replacement cycle of more than double that time. Ergo, it is not surprising that more phones are sold than computers. It doesn't mean people prefer to do computer things on a phone, it just means that people replace phones more often.
Statistics without context may be great for trying to manipulate opinions on the internet, but they certainly don't prove anything.
You weren't there, so your attempt to rationalize that my driving was poor is laughable.
I can 100% guarantee that anyone who drives differently has been rear-ended many times, and been involved in many road-rage incidents. You can't stop on all roads all the time, and drive on highways at under 5km/hr and not get in trouble.
There is no possible way to drive and actually get to your destination if you assume everyone around you has a death wish.
As for "advanced driving qualifications"... sure... talk all you want. We won't go down that road as I feel no need to explain the various qualifications that I have, but suffice it to say that my license is of a significantly higher class than the average driver on the road.
Those statistics mean precisely zero when you don't account for longevity of each device.
Except it clearly does not do what the person wanted to do otherwise they would have been requesting a tablet solution rather than the laptop solution that they specifically asked for. Tablets do not do everything most people need them to because the lack of a physical keyboard is usually a big problem, and the add-on keyboards that you can get for various ones both push the price of the tablet higher than the Chromebook and are nowhere near as useful as a real built-in keyboard. Add to that the fact that they're limited to running only Android or iOS apps, rather than the full Suite of applications that the Chromebook can run and you'll find the most people very quickly run into a problem.
I know quite a few people who have a Chromebook as their only computer, I don't know anyone who has a tablet as their only computer.
Because this is low earth orbit instead of the current geostationary system for satellites latency shouldn't be much of an issue, calculations done for this up thread put the latency for a round trip ping at about 8-12 milliseconds which is effectively nothing when you look at the grand scheme of things. In fact, depending on how they want to route packets, you could actually get decreased ping times when reaching servers on the other side of the planet, has signals actually travel faster through empty space than they do through copper wires are fiber optic cables. (Though my suspicion is that they'll try to get your signal out of space and onto fiber and copper as quickly as possible likely negating that particular benefit)
My suspicion is that the 800 satellites is to deal with the low data caps, you don't need that many satellites to cover the Earth as we've seen with the Iridium system. So it must be that they need this many to be able to handle the usage they're expecting. So I'm not sure the data caps are likely to be a problem. That's said, cost seems highly likely to be an issue because I can't imagine this endeavor being cheap. my best guess is that this will compete with the current satellite internet providers who are fairly expensive for slow speed high latency connections with low data caps. Those providers do however still get business from many people who simply have no other option. If they manage to keep the cost not much higher than the existing satellite providers they will probably see a lot of business due to the significantly lower latency, higher speeds, and more bandwidth.
That said I am really suspecting that musk wants to put these in his cars to give them a permanent internet connection I don't think he's happy with the current LTE solution.
But do several times as much.
There's a reason people choose a laptop over a tablet, and a Chromebook has all of those advantages at a much lower cost as well as in a smaller size. It's also far more relevant post at hand which specifically asks for a laptop solution.
Explain how this is less useful than a tablet (presumably running iOS or Android as those are the dominant players in that space) Even without installing a full linux distro, you still have chromeos AND android. so right away it's more useful than a tablet, and it only goes up from there with things like a full keyboard, and the ability to install another OS if you so desire.
The primary purpose of an airport is to go to other far away places. Those places don't have to be in the small handful of backwards countries that require removing laptops from their bags.
SoCs have their place. Inside another computer isn't one of them. They're great for embedded applications, IoT, etc, etc.
The best you can hope for putting an SoC inside another computer is a very expensive solution, that is full of potential security risks (after all, that's exactly what Intel's management engine was). The only way to mitigate those security risks is to make more and more of your system accessible only to the SoC, and not to the main processor, as long as there are any firmware programmable devices common to the 2, you have a security risk that potentially negates all the effort that's been done to build the separation in the first place.
There's a solution to that.
Move to a country with sane airport facilities where you don't have to take your laptop out of your carry on for no apparent reason. (And yes, I live in such a place)
Then use YOUR laptop. Not your employer's laptop. Why do you think your employer would pay extra for the work machine so that it can include a personal machine for you in it as well? It doesn't benefit them at all, but does have significant risks for them, as well as adding significant costs.
If you want to do personal stuff on a machine, bring a personal machine.
Major corporations who buy their employees thousands of business laptops a year have no reason to spend extra money to also buy the employee a personal laptop in the same case.
Most of these companies have policies explicitly forbidding personal use of their work devices for this reason. The company has no incentive to give the employee a free computer for personal use. From their standpoint it is the employee's responsibility to provide their own equipment for their own personal use. It is also in the employee's best interest as they can avoid any appearance of impropriety.