Not exactly breaking news unless you've been living in closet since widescreen panels came out.
It is nice that some manufacturers (especially Microsoft) are putting out great aspect ratios for productivity.
For productivity, I've found that the sweet spot seems to be either ultra widescreen (side by side applications), or multiple screens with 3:2 / 4:3 / 5:4.
16:10 is much better than 16:9 though, especially on a small device.
I'm getting ready to sell my 16:9 thinkpad carbon x1 for the 16:10 nano or x1 2021. I'm OK with my 16:9 43" monitor because it's so big I get the vertical real-estate but my thinkpad feels as though it's really only useful for watching 16:9 videos which I don't do.
If 2021 is the year of 16:10 for Thinkpad, then I'm hoping 2025 is the year of 3:2 and maybe hopefully sometime in 2030 we'll be full circle back to 4:3!
I suspect it's due to competing with the Dell XPS 17 2020. I prefer Thinkpad due to their keyboards and I am a trackpoint user, but if I really needed 16:10 then I would get something from Dell's XPS line. With the LG I'd be taking a risk with ergonomics such as the keyboard and trackpad, whereas I know what the XPS feels like.
I picked up a 17" Dell XPS with the updated monitor. It is absolutely glorious. Was able to add a M2 drive and upgrade the memory. Had to do a bit of work to get the killer nic to work with Linux, but it is a solid machine. It is remarkably small for such a large screen.
The keyboard/trackpad on the LG is imho better and having pixel less screen @ 17" with the added vertical height is a no contest for productivity.
I took a risk on it as well and it's served really well as a daily worker. The XPS otoh is a (badly executed, no retina) macbook clone.
LG brought out the first light 17" laptop two years ago when everyone was still on 15", but frankly if they don't get support then I'm afraid they'll stop releasing these machines.
I have an ultrawide LG display and it really improved my life, especially with videocalls. I can keep the call window big enough in one half and with the other read code, documentation, looking at a graph etc. Before that I was constantly changing the focused window or not seeing the other person(s).
For writing, I have a 90° angled 27" 16:9 monitor at 1080x1920. It's absolutely unusable for programming since it barely fits 80 characters at a usable scale, but it's like having a giant page in front of me when using a word processor/text editor.
In the office I have two 1080x1920 panels, which can each display two columns of code with room to spare. I use the X11 6x13 “fixed” font, and emacs with fringes but without scrollbars, so each column is a few more than 80 characters wide.
At home I have two 1200x1920 panels, a bit more horizontal breathing room, but my code is still less than 80 wide :-)
Soft-wrapped code tends to be pretty difficult to read though. Certainly much more difficult than wrapped prose. Personally I prefer horizontal scrolling over wrapping code pretty much always (at least on a mac where horizontal scrolling is easy).
Xcode used to be really good at softwrapping code. It was so useful with the assistant editor on a laptop screen. It got worse at some point around Xcode 8 or 9, which was a shame.
Usually word processing and typesetting have word-wrap enabled. This is undesirable in a program. The 9:16 screen may still be useful for programming though, because it's nice to have some documentation out on another screen.
No, 4K is called 4K because 4K is based on cinematic definitions, while the older resolutions are based on TV definitions.
For TV you count the height, as that's the only thing that matters — you can always add more high-frequency signal to increase the width after all. That's why TV signals for e.g. DVD also use a 480p signal for 4:3 and 16:9, you just stretch the content, no problem on analog TV. (In fact, the "p" doesn't mean pixels, it means the content isn't interlaced (progressive) while 1080i would be interlaced content, with both 540p and 1080i having the same amount of lines per frame)
While for cinema you count the width, e.g. what's more commonly known as 1080p is just 2K in cinema terms, as it's 1920 (or roughly 2048) wide. And that's why 4K is 4K, as cinema content is actually rendered in 4096 pixels width. In cinemas you can always add or remove height (just don't project onto that part of the screen, some cinemas even have screens able to change their height), while the width is fixed (you usually can't make the screen wider). Historically this also held true with film: except for IMAX (70mm portrait), you measure the width of the film e.g. 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, as you can always just make the film longer to change the height.
It's true that manufacturers quickly started calling their UHD content 4K for marketing reasons, but 4K doesn't have anything to do with your hypothesis.
Now why was it used as marketing term? When HD and Full HD rolled out for consumers, cinemas started upgrading their projectors as well, offering content in 4K, and advertising it as such. Consumers got used to 4K meaning high resolution high quality. And when consumer devices started reaching a similar quality, obviously the manufacturers used the already established term, instead of the official "UHD" branding.
At least they got away from the alphabet soup nonsense. Nobody wants to try to remember what WQHD or WQSXGA mean. I also hope that they eventually come back around to just listing the two dimensions again.
Related to this, they never did find a good term for 1080P, well, other than 1080P.
720P was branded HD, 4K was branded UHD, but 1080P never got a designation like that. This put Sky in an interesting position, as they only recently added 1080P support to their NowTV streaming subscription service, as an optional upgrade to their usual 720P. Having already long promoted their service as delivering HD, [0] they were clearly at a bit of a loss as to how to describe 1080P. They ended up calling it full HD. [1]
Actually, when the HD standards were introduced, 720p/i was officially designated as "HD Ready", and 1080p/i as "Full HD", with the respective acronyms HD and FHD. Ultra HD obviously got the UHD acronym later on.
Well today I learned. I always thought they called it 4K because doubling the dimensions of a rectangle causes the area to quadruple. No wonder "2K" display resolutions confuse me...
It's 4k because it's an HD resolution (1080) doubled horizontally and vertically.
If this is HD:
┏━━━━┓
┃ ┃
┗━━━━┛
Then 4 of these tiled become 4k:
┏━━━━┳━━━━┓
┃ ┃ ┃
┣━━━━╋━━━━┫
┃ ┃ ┃
┗━━━━┻━━━━┛
I used to have 4 separate HD monitors laid out horizontally on my desk, and in terms of pixel realestate, a 4k effectively replaces them... until retina/high density displays became affordable. Now my 5k monitor is effectively the realestate of 4 HD monitors, but nice and smooth.
640x480 (VGA), 800x600 (SVGA), etc came from the computer industry since they had 4:3 CRTs
720p, 1080p came from the TV industry since they always counted video in "lines" (NTSC is 525 lines)
4K came from the movie industry (the 2005 Digital Cinema specification), since movies have wildly different aspect ratios so counting the vertical doesn't make sense (specifically, it's very rare for movies to be 16:9!)
Proud owner of a Thinkpad R60 [0] here with a 4:3 display. Perfect for coding. (I hadn't planned on keeping it around for 14 years, but these things are simply indestructible)
I've always understood it as 16:9 is for consuming video (consumers), and 16:10 is for editing video (creators), since you can fit a 1080p+ video at full width with an editing toolbar along the bottom.
I enjoy my 34" 3440 x 1440, but I think that a 32" (or slightly larger) 4K might ultimately be the better choice while still fitting in my field of view.
An aside, but the author says: "To me, the MacBook Pro 16" could have been the best programming laptop of all time if only Apple have been willing to provide Linux/Windows drivers. "
Apple does in fact provide Windows drivers for the 16" MBP, as part of Boot Camp.
(Though why you'd choose to run Windows over macOS is impossible for me to comprehend.)
I'm unsatisfied this article didn't tell the reader the area of each screen. It's easy to imagine one vertical being larger than another, but actually having less area. This is not one of those cases. The 14" Lenovo screen actually has more area.
Just as a point to the remark that Linux doesn't work well on Surface products. It's true that it sucks out of the box. But with some patches it's pretty much hassle free. I've been running Linux on my pro for years without any problem.
Maximizing vertical space is why I always put the task bar dock or whatever at the right. Plus you have less back and forth with the mouse because scrollbars are also on the right.
Why aren’t there portrait notebooks? Imagine the width of MacBook Air keyboard as the shorter side and a long notepad like ratio, opens up with a taller height than width.
I can understand people want more vertical real estate, but for me the opposite is actually more useful. The thinkpad screen at 14" is wide enough for me to have two things side by side, often a command line and a file or two files, or (shocker) code beside documentation.
Whilst vertical space is appreciated, the fact is that practically everything is taller than your screen. You are going to be scrolling vertically and everything supports that as an essential feature. Horizontal scroll is a nighmare however.
It's also worth noting that Lenovo's 4k screen on the 15.6inch actually fits more pickels vertically than Apple's 16inch despite physically being shorter. Obviously YMMV with regards to what actually gets represented on your screen.
The thing is, taller displays (like the MS Surface, Dell XPS, LG Gram, etc.) aren't necessarily sacrificing on width, they are just adding height. The goal is to maximize the amount of ergonomic screen real estate.
Of course, there will always be scrolling, but it's much easier to see where you are in the file if more of it is visible at a time.
So one hardware feature (screen format) is like it is, because another hardware feature (horizontal scrolling) is not implemented? Especially touch pads can work perfectly well for horizontal scrolling.
And if you actually use a mouse, in most cases nowadays, you have a desktop monitor and usually not one but multiple, so totally different rules apply there.
But my biggest argument would be that we did not have problems with paper formats ever, but out of a sudden 16:10 or 16:9 is supposed to be better. Sure, software today is fitting a to a modern screen but that is only because it has been designed to fit such a screen.
I guess I'm also a unique snowflake since I actually like 16:9 screens more than 16:10.
For work, more vertical space is nice but so is more horizontal space - it's useful for longer lines and various sidebars and such that all software has lately. I don't really have a preference there.
But for "fun" 16:9 is better since with 16:10 you have black bars in most media, no matter if it's a movie or conference talk or whatever. And fun is important use case for a laptop - I wanna watch movies on a plane or train, and even at home since it's mobile. Having big TV in living room is nice, but being able to watch cooking video right in the kitchen, or tinkering video in garage is great.
I'm actually kinda bummed that Dell went to 16:10 on XPS 13, since I was eyeing that as my next laptop.
I remember a time when laptops were supposed to be exactly what they suggest "lap" top, a computer that you can lug around easily and keep it in your lap while you work. Anything more than a 13 inch imo doesn't really adhere to those ideas. If I wanted a 16 inch screen, I'd use a desktop, or external monitors. But maybe that's just me.
Kind of a useless comment. Obviously there's personal preference. You switch from notebook PC to desktop/external monitors at 13". Others go from tablet to notebook to desktop. Etc. Sounds like something for your blog.
Pretty obvious that there's a market for all of these considering that Apple has high-end devices targeting each segment. Pretty obvious there is utility along the spectrum for all individuals.
I've consistently gotten the largest Mac laptop available over the last 15 years. That's been 17", 15", and 16", and it's a very comfortable size on my lap. (It sometimes gets a little cramped when a large cat wants to share my lap with it, but I can usually manage.)
Naturally, this is going to vary depending on your physical size. A person who's small and slight of build isn't going to be as easily able to use a 16" laptop as me.
The ergonomics of this also depends on the laptop itself. The large Macs are sort of uncommonly good at being used on the lap as a result of lacking the numpad and centering the keyboard/trackpad.
My experience with trying to use my 15 inch Dell w/numpad on my lap is a bit more miserable, because I either have to position it off-center and hanging off my right leg, or type with my hands off-center, which becomes really uncomfortable quickly.
I am tiny, though, so perhaps this would be less annoying to someone with bigger legs where it wouldn't be teetering off constantly.
I think that kind of depends on how big your lap is - I can work on 15" MacBook Pro just fine, while sitting crosslegged.
And of course also how big the laptop is with regards to screen size. For example, modern Dell XPS 13 has 13.4" screen but is narrower than 12" Thinkpads of old.
And there's a big jump from 16" screen in a MacBook to "desktop monitor" which in modern office probably would be 27" 4k display.
It is nice that some manufacturers (especially Microsoft) are putting out great aspect ratios for productivity.
For productivity, I've found that the sweet spot seems to be either ultra widescreen (side by side applications), or multiple screens with 3:2 / 4:3 / 5:4.
16:10 is much better than 16:9 though, especially on a small device.