7 ms·

The Widescreen Laptop Conspiracy

70 points by parenthesis 16y ago

paol 16y ago
3 years later the situation is even worse. Not only has 4:3 disappeared entirely, 16:10 is going away too in favor of 16:9 (apparently, I hear, this is because the 16:9 form factor allows better yields in the lcd manufacturing process). This wouldn't be much of a problem in 17" screens or above but below - which is where most portable devices fall - the 16:9 form factor feels like peeking at the world through a slit. When I got a new 15" laptop last year I picked an older model that had just been discontinued, because it's successor moved from 16:10 to 16:9. Of course what I really wanted was a 14" 4:3 but you can't have that for any amount of money.
- rjprins 16y ago
  Exactly, a year ago I was looking for a small portable laptop and definitely wanted a Thinkpad. I could choose the X300, X200s or an old, second-hand X61s with 4:3 screen ratio. Then I saw this image: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/34872.jpg http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/34872.jpg It's so obvious what is best for small laptops. X61s is smaller and has more screen real-estate compared to the 4 times more expensive X300. I think even if Lenovo wanted to go back to 4:3, they can't because of the screen manufacturers. Another side-effect of the small laptops having widescreen is the lack of wrist support.
  - paol 16y ago
    "if Lenovo wanted to go back to 4:3, they can't because of the screen manufacturers" They certainly can, they (or anyone) just would be at a disadvantage in terms of price because of volume (and manufacturing cost, if what I wrote above is to be believed). Considering that laptops are the kind of market where most people only look at price(1), that's not good business. (1) Except for apple of course. The only think they are better at than design is branding, and they've branded themselves above the price fray.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- shimon 16y ago
  I did the same thing - bought an older 16:10 model to avoid having to go 16:9. I have a Thinkpad W500 with a 1920x1200 15" screen. If 4:3 screens were still available, I'd have bought one of those. On the bright side, if you're shopping for a discontinued model and screen resolution is more important that other stuff, you can get a phenomenal deal.
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    Where? I'm looking to get W500 but reluctant to go ebay or some no-name discount site.
    - jamesbritt 16y ago
      Found a few different configurations on Provantage :)
- jerf 16y ago
  "3 years later the situation is even worse." It's even worse even worse. 2007 you probably could still get a higher-quality LCD than TN, though it was becoming a significant challenge. Now it's flat-out impossible, as near as I can tell. If you care about display quality just about your only choice is WLED or Dell's BGR-LCD, which tends to be only intermittently available from them anyhow. These are better than a standard TN display, in that there at least exist angles you can view a 15" or 17" screen without being able to see glaringly-obvious color fade on the top and bottom of the screen, but they're still not perfect. I just got a Studio 17 with that; 15 is your only other choice but for some reason it was much more expensive and I couldn't justify it. (I am a fairly large man, 6'4"-ish, so a 17" laptop is much more comfortable for me than most, I actually sort of like it but I very much believe I'm the exception. Seeing this machine on my wife's lap is a bit comical looking, especially now that I'm used to seeing the little netbook.) On the bright side, 17" laptops are nowhere near as clunky as they were in 2007. They're still 17", of course. Unfortunately, my first "real" laptop, I accidentally acquired an IPS-based laptop, and it has spoiled me. All I wanted was the higher res, got the higher quality without even knowing there were quality grades at the time. Resolutions I don't care about as much. My preferred layout is two emacs windows next to each other and I often chop those in half vertically anyhow. At 1920x1080 I can get three next to each other. Terminal off to the side (covering what usually ends up being the tertiary window anyhow), web browser and associated stuff on another virtual desktop one keystroke away. I don't mind the widescreen at all, but if your preferred editor has stronger ideas about screen layout I could see how it would be annoying.
  - jseliger 16y ago
    It's even worse even worse. 2007 you probably could still get a higher-quality LCD than TN, though it was becoming a significant challenge. Now it's flat-out impossible, as near as I can tell. I'm pleased to note that it's NOT flat-out impossible: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on-the-go http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on... . It's just really expensive. I think the version of the IPS HP laptop Anandtech tested is something like $5K, and the defaults are something like $3.5K. But if you've gotta have it...
    - 16y ago
wccrawford 16y ago
Conspiracy? Couldn't possibly be market forces at work. No, must be some grand conspiracy to make monitors the wrong size for programmers.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- barrkel 16y ago
  I think it's similar reasons for the oddness in labeling HDD sizes at odds with how memory is labeled: widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing screen area. Throw in a bunch of influential purchasers who buy based on spec / price tradeoff, and mix in desktop monitor trends (16:10->16:9) following flatscreen TV trends for economies of scale reasons, and you get a very hard to turn around trend. If it were simple market forces at work, I would have found it easier to avoid buying widescreen monitors and laptops. I couldn't; there wasn't an alternative choice.
  - moe 16y ago
    widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing screen area Huh?
    - paol 16y ago
      For any given diagonal size, the actual area of the LCD decreases as the aspect ratio increases.
      - tapiwa 16y ago
        This is really bad maths. Imagine diagonal of X cm. Imagine screen so tall and thin, that diagonal approaches vertical. Area is tiny. As you swing same diagonal downwards, area increases. Till diagonal is 45% from horizontal. As you keep going, area begins to reduce, until, when diagonal is almost horizontal, area is tiny. Needing to get out more ...
zievo 16y ago
First, I'll mirror my distaste for the lack of 1200 height screens. I recently purchased a laptop and had to settle for a 1080 screen over a 1200 due to the exorbitant prices. Disguisted. However, I've been programming for 23 years and I love the wide format. I can comfortably fit two columns of code if I wish, or one column with room for other apps on the side (IM, my taskbar to the right, reference material, etc.). Complaining because your screen is too wide makes no sense. Stop maximizing everything.
- raghava 16y ago
  vimdiff => wide format FTW! >>two columns of code And that's precisely why I bought a 20" wide one, to go with my laptop. And it has been great! I felt that it's not the presence of width that bothers OP but lack of vertical real-estate on the screen.
  - zievo 16y ago
    I didn't get that feeling. A revealing quote: "The astute reader will point out that there are many 15″ notebooks out there that feature 1920×1200 LCD’s. To this, I will refer you to my previous point: that widescreen sucks for software development and most business purposes."
  - zievo 16y ago
    After rereading parts of the article, I concede your point. He is hating on width, but he also complains about lack of vertical height. I may have been sleeping when I read it the first time.
  - xiaomai 16y ago
    I agree that vimdiff is great on a widescreen. I like it so much that I do all my development with vertical splits now (instead of horizontal splits as I used to). ^w v
- orangecat 16y ago
  Not too wide, too short. A few years ago 1680x1050 used to be a quasi-standard for good 15" displays. Now you're lucky to get 1600x900.
PaulHoule 16y ago
I don't have any trouble with widescreens. Right now I'm programming on a computer that has 3 16:9 screens, for a total aspect ratio of 48:9, and I've got a spare DVI connector, so someday I might add screen #4 which would get me to 64:9.
- lutorm 16y ago
  I don't either -- I run them in portrait. (But 16:9 is too narrow for even that. And it doesn't work on a laptop, of course, but that seems more constrained by keyboard shape, too.)
  - PaulHoule 16y ago
    I wouldn't do serious programming work on a laptop, either. It's nice for doing an hour of two of coding at home or a little sysadmin work, but for extended sessions I really appreciate a top-of-the-line desktop machine with multiple monitors.
jcl 16y ago
To be fair, while the format shift has made laptop screens less suitable for programming, it has improved laptop keyboards a lot.
- Zak 16y ago
  There is virtually no difference between the keyboard on my current 15.4" 16:10 Thinkpad W500 and the 14" 4:3 Thinkpad T20 I had years ago. The only things I can think of that have changed are that they added Windows, back and forward keys.
trotsky 16y ago
Posted in 2007. Also the dell outlet still gets some 4:3 16x12 "workstation" class laptops in in 2011 (albeit, from a few years ago) - so it really wasn't impossible to find them in 2007. What I really wonder about is a guy who is a technology entrepreneur and goes 6 years from 2000-2006/7 without replacing his laptop. Check out the specs for the Inspiron 8100 he was using: 8lbs, P3 1.1Ghz, 128MB RAM, 48GB disk (as reviewed in late 2001).
jasonkester 16y ago
It's surprising that none of the major laptop manufacturers have thought to offer a model for developers. All I can think is that we're just too small a minority for it to be profitable. As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development. Widescreen knocks out 90% of the choices, and that overlaps with the 90% who break up the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn block that programmers need to be sitting up there intact under our right pinky. Dell Latitude and Lenovo's T series were keeping me alive for several years there, but both of them are now getting skinnier and wider to the point where I dread having to buy a new dev machine. Worse, netbooks have pushed small notebooks completely out of the market. There is simply no modern equivilent to the ThinkPad X51, with its tons of power, intact keyboard, 4:3 aspect ratio, bombproof steel case and 12" size. Here's hoping things will change...
- micheljansen 16y ago
  Speak for yourself. I do all my web- and application development on laptops and desktop systems with wide screen monitors and I love it. Yes, my code always takes up the full height of the screen and only part of its width, but I use the remaining space for keeping documentation, utilities and the app I am developing open alongside my code. I wouldn't go back to 4:3 at all.
- avar 16y ago
  I'm a developer and I never use the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys. I use the equivalent readline and Emacs keybindings for those. I develop on Debian running on a MacBook Pro. Sometimes the screen size bothers me, but the laptop being bigger would probably inconvenience me more. I might be an unusual case, but perhaps what you imagine the market for developers to be isn't the actual market for developers.
  - moe 16y ago
    ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys How do you scroll up in a terminal window?
    - mquander 16y ago
asnyder 16y ago
It's not that hard to get a high resolution laptop. For example, the higher end ThinkPads always always offer a WUXGA (Wide Ultra eXtended Graphics Array Resolution) option for up to 1920×1200 resolution.
- tsuraan 16y ago
  When you say higher-end, do you mean larger or something else? I would really like to see replacement options for my Sony laptop, which is a 13.3" with a 1600x900 resolution, but from what I can find, only Sony has a nice resolution (1080p now) in that size. Does Lenovo have something that I've been missing?
  - asnyder 16y ago
    By higher end I mean their T and W lines.They tend to be about $500 - $2000 more than their other lines.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  Still? I've been checking their site for a ~15" wuxga laptop, but all seem to be "HD".
micheljansen 16y ago
And of course this has nothing to do with the fact that 94.21% of all consumers prefers to watch their YouTube videos full-screen without letterbox.
dedward 16y ago
I'd never want to go back to 4:3 - but I do miss the higher DPI we had, what, a decade ago ? My 15" 4:3 1600x1200 toshiba was awesome. Give me a modern widescreen laptop with the same (or given it's been a decade, how about even higher) DPI and I'll be happy. The high-DPI laptop screens didn't stick around long - I suspect mainly because OS support at the time didn't adjust well - fonts were too small for many people to read, the settings to adjust them for the higher DPI screens didn't work all that well and caused a lot of apps to misbehave , and so the market clearly preferred the lower DPI screens. Given they were probably much cheaper to produce - it's a no-brainer for the manufacturers - drop the high-density displays.
- zokier 16y ago
  I think that both HP and Dell offer 1920 wide 15" displays. But where I could get 24" display with similar DPI/PPI?
  - die_sekte 16y ago
    There was an IBM display with ~3800x2560 22" a few years ago. Sadly, it was discontinued some years after being introduced. IIRC 2008 or 2009 some manufacturer wanted to make them again, with a roughly 10k$ price. Edit: That was the IBM T220/T221. In 2007, Toshiba announced a revival, but didn't end up producing them.
- qjz 16y ago
  It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law. Developers shouldn't need to worry about pixels, but there still aren't enough to spare. Unfortunately, netbooks and tablets have taken us a step backwards (most web developers had already abandoned support for 800x600 screens, and even some native apps can't accommodate such short vertical resolutions). I'd much rather target precise measurements or percentages and let the OS adapt the output to a very high resolution display.
  - jseliger 16y ago
    It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law. Moore's law holds that the number of transistors that will fit on a chip doubles every two years, later reduced to 18 months: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law . Unless I'm missing something -- which is always possible -- it doesn't have anything to do with monitors.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
I've ranted in the past about the move for TVs. It doesn't make sense for people (like me) who are space-constrained. I need to replace a 32" 4:3 TV, and could only fit a 27" 16:9 in its place. The "upgrade" forced me to have significantly less screen space. I've seen the same thing is digital picture frames, which makes no sense whatsoever. Every real camera in the universe takes pictures in the 4:3 neighborhood, or even square in the case of larger format cameras. With a 16:9 frame, you're never, ever, going to use the left and right edges.
- dazzla 16y ago
  I'm with you for the photo frames but losing the space on the TV has already happened. Most of the content your watching will be widescreen so you'll have the bars top and bottom effectively giving you that 27" 16:9 TV. Unless of course you are full screening everything and not seeing a lot of the content as the sides are being chopped off.
dlevine 16y ago
I actually prefer 16:9 widescreens for development. The wider the display, the more likely I will be able to fit two windows side by side. Real estate at the bottom doesn't matter all that much, because modern systems make scrolling effortless. I know that I'm getting ripped off in terms of pixel count, but I recently bought a 23" IPS display for about the same that a 19" IPS cost a few years back. They are the same height (both physically, and in pixel count), but I get more than 50% more horizontal area. Seems like a win to me...
- roc 16y ago
  I agree on scrolling and side-by-side. I also note that the overwhelming majority of functions and core loops still fit on wide screens 'missing' those 300 pixels along the bottom. How often are we simultaneously considering multiple functions that happen to be located directly above or below one another in code? Also, the Code Bubbles concept IDE from a while back would really shine on a wide screen, as compared to 4:3 for that same 'side by side' reason. I really hope that project gets more traction and flourishes.
yatsyk 16y ago
Completely agree with this article. Wide-screen of same diagonal is cheaper to produce. May be situation could be better if we measure screen in megapixels or useful area. I've never watched any movie on my laptop. I don't need additional distractive windows with documentation, browser or sidebars. But now with different toolbars working area is very narrow. May be one of the reason why sales of windows and android tablets so bad because all of them use widescreen but iPAD is not widescreen and has quite good screen with large useful area. I believe that there is a market for laptops with high-DPI IPS non-glossy screens for professionals (not only developers).
s_jambo 16y ago
Get a refurbished thinkpad. Mine was 3 years old when I bought it, it's now 4 years old and runs fine. When it dies I'll get another refurbished thinkpad and once again save hundreds of pounds.
- lsc 16y ago
  this is also my strategy. If you are willing to do a bit of hardware work, you can make them last forever; parts for used thinkpads are easier to come by than just about any other model of laptop I know of.
goombastic 16y ago
I miss my old electric typewriter with it's one line of text. I am glad it's slowly coming back.
- cd34 16y ago
  I still remember my days on the decwroter\r\e\t\oiter
iuguy 16y ago
Moving from 1024x768 4:3 to 16:9 1900x1200 was an experience and a half. I remember when I only had 256x192 to write code on. Even on the Amiga you'd normally have 320x256 (in PAL land) or at most 640x512 (and a headache from the interlace). By contrast I can take my 1900x1200 laptop anywhere, fit a full eclipse session with windows and tabs everywhere or have multiple word docs side by side, or terminals everywhere. It's endless, and it's incredible. Some people prefer 4:3, some 16:9. I think the author's points on total pixels are valid, but claims about missing height, not so much. And if height is such a concern, move your dock/start bar to the side.
goombastic 16y ago
A bunch of reviews that state screen area and DPI would out this crappy practice. Hardware reviewers and magazines should take note. Reviewers have more of an influence on people's buying choices than one thinks. It's sad that many if not most are just brochure copiers.
51Cards 16y ago
Good God I love this guy... I have been thinking the same thing for a few years now. I am holding tightly onto a couple T60p Thinkpads with 4:3 UXGA screens just because there is NOTHING on the market right now I would want to develop on. I really wish there was a way to make this point to manufacturers. edit: my other gripe about many of the new wide laptops is the addition of a number pad on many. This forces you to type shifted to the left since you can't move the keyboard relative to the screen. EVERY wide laptop that offers a keyboard with a number pad should also offer a standard keyboard that is centered in the unit. This could easily be done with filler plates on either side.
MaysonL 16y ago
It would be great if somebody would make laptop with a pivot screen: I'd buy one in a heartbeat (unless the thief who stole my Mac this afternoon returns it).
astrodust 16y ago
What a weak argument. Buy a 24" screen. Rotate 90°. Shut up and enjoy.
- mthoms 16y ago
  Except he's talking about laptops.

70 points by parenthesis 16y ago

paol 16y ago

3 years later the situation is even worse. Not only has 4:3 disappeared entirely, 16:10 is going away too in favor of 16:9 (apparently, I hear, this is because the 16:9 form factor allows better yields in the lcd manufacturing process). This wouldn't be much of a problem in 17" screens or above but below - which is where most portable devices fall - the 16:9 form factor feels like peeking at the world through a slit. When I got a new 15" laptop last year I picked an older model that had just been discontinued, because it's successor moved from 16:10 to 16:9. Of course what I really wanted was a 14" 4:3 but you can't have that for any amount of money.

rjprins 16y ago
Exactly, a year ago I was looking for a small portable laptop and definitely wanted a Thinkpad. I could choose the X300, X200s or an old, second-hand X61s with 4:3 screen ratio. Then I saw this image: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/34872.jpg http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/34872.jpg It's so obvious what is best for small laptops. X61s is smaller and has more screen real-estate compared to the 4 times more expensive X300. I think even if Lenovo wanted to go back to 4:3, they can't because of the screen manufacturers. Another side-effect of the small laptops having widescreen is the lack of wrist support.
- paol 16y ago
  "if Lenovo wanted to go back to 4:3, they can't because of the screen manufacturers" They certainly can, they (or anyone) just would be at a disadvantage in terms of price because of volume (and manufacturing cost, if what I wrote above is to be believed). Considering that laptops are the kind of market where most people only look at price(1), that's not good business. (1) Except for apple of course. The only think they are better at than design is branding, and they've branded themselves above the price fray.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
shimon 16y ago
I did the same thing - bought an older 16:10 model to avoid having to go 16:9. I have a Thinkpad W500 with a 1920x1200 15" screen. If 4:3 screens were still available, I'd have bought one of those. On the bright side, if you're shopping for a discontinued model and screen resolution is more important that other stuff, you can get a phenomenal deal.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  Where? I'm looking to get W500 but reluctant to go ebay or some no-name discount site.
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    Found a few different configurations on Provantage :)
jerf 16y ago
"3 years later the situation is even worse." It's even worse even worse. 2007 you probably could still get a higher-quality LCD than TN, though it was becoming a significant challenge. Now it's flat-out impossible, as near as I can tell. If you care about display quality just about your only choice is WLED or Dell's BGR-LCD, which tends to be only intermittently available from them anyhow. These are better than a standard TN display, in that there at least exist angles you can view a 15" or 17" screen without being able to see glaringly-obvious color fade on the top and bottom of the screen, but they're still not perfect. I just got a Studio 17 with that; 15 is your only other choice but for some reason it was much more expensive and I couldn't justify it. (I am a fairly large man, 6'4"-ish, so a 17" laptop is much more comfortable for me than most, I actually sort of like it but I very much believe I'm the exception. Seeing this machine on my wife's lap is a bit comical looking, especially now that I'm used to seeing the little netbook.) On the bright side, 17" laptops are nowhere near as clunky as they were in 2007. They're still 17", of course. Unfortunately, my first "real" laptop, I accidentally acquired an IPS-based laptop, and it has spoiled me. All I wanted was the higher res, got the higher quality without even knowing there were quality grades at the time. Resolutions I don't care about as much. My preferred layout is two emacs windows next to each other and I often chop those in half vertically anyhow. At 1920x1080 I can get three next to each other. Terminal off to the side (covering what usually ends up being the tertiary window anyhow), web browser and associated stuff on another virtual desktop one keystroke away. I don't mind the widescreen at all, but if your preferred editor has stronger ideas about screen layout I could see how it would be annoying.
- jseliger 16y ago
  It's even worse even worse. 2007 you probably could still get a higher-quality LCD than TN, though it was becoming a significant challenge. Now it's flat-out impossible, as near as I can tell. I'm pleased to note that it's NOT flat-out impossible: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on-the-go http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on... . It's just really expensive. I think the version of the IPS HP laptop Anandtech tested is something like $5K, and the defaults are something like $3.5K. But if you've gotta have it...
  - 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago

Conspiracy? Couldn't possibly be market forces at work. No, must be some grand conspiracy to make monitors the wrong size for programmers.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
barrkel 16y ago
I think it's similar reasons for the oddness in labeling HDD sizes at odds with how memory is labeled: widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing screen area. Throw in a bunch of influential purchasers who buy based on spec / price tradeoff, and mix in desktop monitor trends (16:10->16:9) following flatscreen TV trends for economies of scale reasons, and you get a very hard to turn around trend. If it were simple market forces at work, I would have found it easier to avoid buying widescreen monitors and laptops. I couldn't; there wasn't an alternative choice.
- moe 16y ago
  widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing screen area Huh?
  - paol 16y ago
    For any given diagonal size, the actual area of the LCD decreases as the aspect ratio increases.
    - tapiwa 16y ago
      This is really bad maths. Imagine diagonal of X cm. Imagine screen so tall and thin, that diagonal approaches vertical. Area is tiny. As you swing same diagonal downwards, area increases. Till diagonal is 45% from horizontal. As you keep going, area begins to reduce, until, when diagonal is almost horizontal, area is tiny. Needing to get out more ...

zievo 16y ago

First, I'll mirror my distaste for the lack of 1200 height screens. I recently purchased a laptop and had to settle for a 1080 screen over a 1200 due to the exorbitant prices. Disguisted. However, I've been programming for 23 years and I love the wide format. I can comfortably fit two columns of code if I wish, or one column with room for other apps on the side (IM, my taskbar to the right, reference material, etc.). Complaining because your screen is too wide makes no sense. Stop maximizing everything.

raghava 16y ago
vimdiff => wide format FTW! >>two columns of code And that's precisely why I bought a 20" wide one, to go with my laptop. And it has been great! I felt that it's not the presence of width that bothers OP but lack of vertical real-estate on the screen.
- zievo 16y ago
  I didn't get that feeling. A revealing quote: "The astute reader will point out that there are many 15″ notebooks out there that feature 1920×1200 LCD’s. To this, I will refer you to my previous point: that widescreen sucks for software development and most business purposes."
- zievo 16y ago
  After rereading parts of the article, I concede your point. He is hating on width, but he also complains about lack of vertical height. I may have been sleeping when I read it the first time.
- xiaomai 16y ago
  I agree that vimdiff is great on a widescreen. I like it so much that I do all my development with vertical splits now (instead of horizontal splits as I used to). ^w v
orangecat 16y ago
Not too wide, too short. A few years ago 1680x1050 used to be a quasi-standard for good 15" displays. Now you're lucky to get 1600x900.

PaulHoule 16y ago

I don't have any trouble with widescreens. Right now I'm programming on a computer that has 3 16:9 screens, for a total aspect ratio of 48:9, and I've got a spare DVI connector, so someday I might add screen #4 which would get me to 64:9.

lutorm 16y ago
I don't either -- I run them in portrait. (But 16:9 is too narrow for even that. And it doesn't work on a laptop, of course, but that seems more constrained by keyboard shape, too.)
- PaulHoule 16y ago
  I wouldn't do serious programming work on a laptop, either. It's nice for doing an hour of two of coding at home or a little sysadmin work, but for extended sessions I really appreciate a top-of-the-line desktop machine with multiple monitors.

jcl 16y ago

To be fair, while the format shift has made laptop screens less suitable for programming, it has improved laptop keyboards a lot.

Zak 16y ago
There is virtually no difference between the keyboard on my current 15.4" 16:10 Thinkpad W500 and the 14" 4:3 Thinkpad T20 I had years ago. The only things I can think of that have changed are that they added Windows, back and forward keys.

trotsky 16y ago

Posted in 2007. Also the dell outlet still gets some 4:3 16x12 "workstation" class laptops in in 2011 (albeit, from a few years ago) - so it really wasn't impossible to find them in 2007. What I really wonder about is a guy who is a technology entrepreneur and goes 6 years from 2000-2006/7 without replacing his laptop. Check out the specs for the Inspiron 8100 he was using: 8lbs, P3 1.1Ghz, 128MB RAM, 48GB disk (as reviewed in late 2001).

jasonkester 16y ago

It's surprising that none of the major laptop manufacturers have thought to offer a model for developers. All I can think is that we're just too small a minority for it to be profitable. As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development. Widescreen knocks out 90% of the choices, and that overlaps with the 90% who break up the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn block that programmers need to be sitting up there intact under our right pinky. Dell Latitude and Lenovo's T series were keeping me alive for several years there, but both of them are now getting skinnier and wider to the point where I dread having to buy a new dev machine. Worse, netbooks have pushed small notebooks completely out of the market. There is simply no modern equivilent to the ThinkPad X51, with its tons of power, intact keyboard, 4:3 aspect ratio, bombproof steel case and 12" size. Here's hoping things will change...

micheljansen 16y ago
Speak for yourself. I do all my web- and application development on laptops and desktop systems with wide screen monitors and I love it. Yes, my code always takes up the full height of the screen and only part of its width, but I use the remaining space for keeping documentation, utilities and the app I am developing open alongside my code. I wouldn't go back to 4:3 at all.
avar 16y ago
I'm a developer and I never use the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys. I use the equivalent readline and Emacs keybindings for those. I develop on Debian running on a MacBook Pro. Sometimes the screen size bothers me, but the laptop being bigger would probably inconvenience me more. I might be an unusual case, but perhaps what you imagine the market for developers to be isn't the actual market for developers.
- moe 16y ago
  ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys How do you scroll up in a terminal window?
  - mquander 16y ago

asnyder 16y ago

It's not that hard to get a high resolution laptop. For example, the higher end ThinkPads always always offer a WUXGA (Wide Ultra eXtended Graphics Array Resolution) option for up to 1920×1200 resolution.

tsuraan 16y ago
When you say higher-end, do you mean larger or something else? I would really like to see replacement options for my Sony laptop, which is a 13.3" with a 1600x900 resolution, but from what I can find, only Sony has a nice resolution (1080p now) in that size. Does Lenovo have something that I've been missing?
- asnyder 16y ago
  By higher end I mean their T and W lines.They tend to be about $500 - $2000 more than their other lines.
jamesbritt 16y ago
Still? I've been checking their site for a ~15" wuxga laptop, but all seem to be "HD".

micheljansen 16y ago

And of course this has nothing to do with the fact that 94.21% of all consumers prefers to watch their YouTube videos full-screen without letterbox.

dedward 16y ago

I'd never want to go back to 4:3 - but I do miss the higher DPI we had, what, a decade ago ? My 15" 4:3 1600x1200 toshiba was awesome. Give me a modern widescreen laptop with the same (or given it's been a decade, how about even higher) DPI and I'll be happy. The high-DPI laptop screens didn't stick around long - I suspect mainly because OS support at the time didn't adjust well - fonts were too small for many people to read, the settings to adjust them for the higher DPI screens didn't work all that well and caused a lot of apps to misbehave , and so the market clearly preferred the lower DPI screens. Given they were probably much cheaper to produce - it's a no-brainer for the manufacturers - drop the high-density displays.

zokier 16y ago
I think that both HP and Dell offer 1920 wide 15" displays. But where I could get 24" display with similar DPI/PPI?
- die_sekte 16y ago
  There was an IBM display with ~3800x2560 22" a few years ago. Sadly, it was discontinued some years after being introduced. IIRC 2008 or 2009 some manufacturer wanted to make them again, with a roughly 10k$ price. Edit: That was the IBM T220/T221. In 2007, Toshiba announced a revival, but didn't end up producing them.
qjz 16y ago
It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law. Developers shouldn't need to worry about pixels, but there still aren't enough to spare. Unfortunately, netbooks and tablets have taken us a step backwards (most web developers had already abandoned support for 800x600 screens, and even some native apps can't accommodate such short vertical resolutions). I'd much rather target precise measurements or percentages and let the OS adapt the output to a very high resolution display.
- jseliger 16y ago
  It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law. Moore's law holds that the number of transistors that will fit on a chip doubles every two years, later reduced to 18 months: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law . Unless I'm missing something -- which is always possible -- it doesn't have anything to do with monitors.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

I've ranted in the past about the move for TVs. It doesn't make sense for people (like me) who are space-constrained. I need to replace a 32" 4:3 TV, and could only fit a 27" 16:9 in its place. The "upgrade" forced me to have significantly less screen space. I've seen the same thing is digital picture frames, which makes no sense whatsoever. Every real camera in the universe takes pictures in the 4:3 neighborhood, or even square in the case of larger format cameras. With a 16:9 frame, you're never, ever, going to use the left and right edges.

dazzla 16y ago
I'm with you for the photo frames but losing the space on the TV has already happened. Most of the content your watching will be widescreen so you'll have the bars top and bottom effectively giving you that 27" 16:9 TV. Unless of course you are full screening everything and not seeing a lot of the content as the sides are being chopped off.

dlevine 16y ago

I actually prefer 16:9 widescreens for development. The wider the display, the more likely I will be able to fit two windows side by side. Real estate at the bottom doesn't matter all that much, because modern systems make scrolling effortless. I know that I'm getting ripped off in terms of pixel count, but I recently bought a 23" IPS display for about the same that a 19" IPS cost a few years back. They are the same height (both physically, and in pixel count), but I get more than 50% more horizontal area. Seems like a win to me...

roc 16y ago
I agree on scrolling and side-by-side. I also note that the overwhelming majority of functions and core loops still fit on wide screens 'missing' those 300 pixels along the bottom. How often are we simultaneously considering multiple functions that happen to be located directly above or below one another in code? Also, the Code Bubbles concept IDE from a while back would really shine on a wide screen, as compared to 4:3 for that same 'side by side' reason. I really hope that project gets more traction and flourishes.

yatsyk 16y ago

Completely agree with this article. Wide-screen of same diagonal is cheaper to produce. May be situation could be better if we measure screen in megapixels or useful area. I've never watched any movie on my laptop. I don't need additional distractive windows with documentation, browser or sidebars. But now with different toolbars working area is very narrow. May be one of the reason why sales of windows and android tablets so bad because all of them use widescreen but iPAD is not widescreen and has quite good screen with large useful area. I believe that there is a market for laptops with high-DPI IPS non-glossy screens for professionals (not only developers).

s_jambo 16y ago

Get a refurbished thinkpad. Mine was 3 years old when I bought it, it's now 4 years old and runs fine. When it dies I'll get another refurbished thinkpad and once again save hundreds of pounds.

lsc 16y ago
this is also my strategy. If you are willing to do a bit of hardware work, you can make them last forever; parts for used thinkpads are easier to come by than just about any other model of laptop I know of.

goombastic 16y ago

I miss my old electric typewriter with it's one line of text. I am glad it's slowly coming back.

cd34 16y ago
I still remember my days on the decwroter\r\e\t\oiter

iuguy 16y ago

Moving from 1024x768 4:3 to 16:9 1900x1200 was an experience and a half. I remember when I only had 256x192 to write code on. Even on the Amiga you'd normally have 320x256 (in PAL land) or at most 640x512 (and a headache from the interlace). By contrast I can take my 1900x1200 laptop anywhere, fit a full eclipse session with windows and tabs everywhere or have multiple word docs side by side, or terminals everywhere. It's endless, and it's incredible. Some people prefer 4:3, some 16:9. I think the author's points on total pixels are valid, but claims about missing height, not so much. And if height is such a concern, move your dock/start bar to the side.

goombastic 16y ago

A bunch of reviews that state screen area and DPI would out this crappy practice. Hardware reviewers and magazines should take note. Reviewers have more of an influence on people's buying choices than one thinks. It's sad that many if not most are just brochure copiers.

51Cards 16y ago

Good God I love this guy... I have been thinking the same thing for a few years now. I am holding tightly onto a couple T60p Thinkpads with 4:3 UXGA screens just because there is NOTHING on the market right now I would want to develop on. I really wish there was a way to make this point to manufacturers. edit: my other gripe about many of the new wide laptops is the addition of a number pad on many. This forces you to type shifted to the left since you can't move the keyboard relative to the screen. EVERY wide laptop that offers a keyboard with a number pad should also offer a standard keyboard that is centered in the unit. This could easily be done with filler plates on either side.

MaysonL 16y ago

It would be great if somebody would make laptop with a pivot screen: I'd buy one in a heartbeat (unless the thief who stole my Mac this afternoon returns it).

astrodust 16y ago

What a weak argument. Buy a 24" screen. Rotate 90°. Shut up and enjoy.

mthoms 16y ago
Except he's talking about laptops.