I always figured that 16:9 screens took off because they could leverage the panels being produced en masse for HDTVs. That sort of made sense for desktop monit

I always figured that 16:9 screens took off because they could leverage the panels being produced en masse for HDTVs. That sort of made sense for desktop monitors, for a little while, but the overlap between laptop/monitor and TV offerings has almost completely disappeared-- 17" and smaller TVs are not mass market items. I wonder if part of it is just as a penny pinching gimmick now: a square monitor of X diagonal gives you more square centimetres of panel than a wider screen does.