

The Widescreen Laptop Conspiracy - parenthesis
http://www.singlefounder.com/2007/04/04/widescreenlaptopconspiracy/

======
paol
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.

~~~
jerf
"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
_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...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on-the-go) .
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...

~~~
jerf
Cool. At least somebody understands there is a market at all; may this be the
harbinger of some further price drop in the future. (I observe this
announcement post-dates my laptop which I purchased in late October.)

------
zievo
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
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
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."

------
jasonkester
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...

~~~
avar
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.

~~~
larrik
I use Home and End like crazy, which is one reason I haven't switched to OS/X
as my main machine.

~~~
geeksam
Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E work in most input controls, and definitely work in the
terminal.

------
dedward
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.

~~~
qjz
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
_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> . Unless I'm missing something --
which is always possible -- it doesn't have anything to do with monitors.

~~~
jerf
If you're going to be pendantic, do it right: Moore's Law is about the price
of transistors on a single IC. For instance, the actual Moore's Law hasn't
quite stalled yet, we're still getting transistors for cheaper even if
clockspeeds themselves have stalled. It's also independent of the wafer size
so you can still get a generation of Moore's Law just by growing the wafer
size without raising the price.

I daresay monitors actually _have_ benefited from that, but instead of raising
resolution we've been dropping prices. Though I would imagine LCD-related fab
processes not technically under Moore's Law are responsible for more of that.

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

~~~
barrkel
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
_widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing
screen area_

Huh?

~~~
paol
For any given diagonal size, the actual area of the LCD decreases as the
aspect ratio increases.

~~~
tapiwa
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 ...

~~~
barrkel
The assertion is true for all landscape orientation monitors, which has almost
always been the case in this context. You're really clutching at straws with
this pedantry (IMHO).

------
dlevine
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
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.

------
trotsky
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).

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

~~~
Zak
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.

------
micheljansen
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.

------
51Cards
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.

------
yatsyk
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).

------
PaulHoule
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
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
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.

------
asnyder
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
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
By higher end I mean their T and W lines.They tend to be about $500 - $2000
more than their other lines.

------
CWuestefeld
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
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.

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

~~~
cd34
I still remember my days on the decwroter\r\e\t\oiter

------
iuguy
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.

------
s_jambo
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
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
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.

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

~~~
mthoms
Except he's talking about laptops.

