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You're making me miss my Thinkpad T60p. Compared to my new W500, it wasn't especially fast, ran annoyingly hot and didn't waste any time burning through its extra-capacity battery. The screen was vastly better though: IPS with a 1600x1200 resolution.

I don't actually need color accuracy, but I find myself slightly shocked by how bad other laptops look after getting used to the T60p. Laptop manufacturers: I'd pay extra for IPS (don't invent your own cute name for it or I won't know you have it) and I'd pay extra for high-res 4:3.

> I'd pay extra for high-res 4:3

I suspect they know this, and simply shifted the market to 16:9 so they could later charge a premium for what used to be the standard.

I'd believe that if anyone was actually selling 4:3 laptops at a premium.

That wouldn't have happened yet. In my head, I have a loose projection of when I figure it would, it's something like 2013-2015

In any case, I'm not saying it's fact, just loose speculation

I don't think waiting until people decide they can tolerate 16:10 or 16:9 would be a good strategy. Thinkpads were some of the last laptops to offer 4:3 models, and people were buying them for that reason. They already have premium prices and a reputation for quality; I think if anybody was going to do this, Lenovo would already be doing it.

These are people who don't understand that marketing is important, despite the obvious example of Apple who seem to not only survive, but thrive almost purely on marketing...

I suspect the truth is more likely that 16:9/10 is so much more popular that its no longer economical to produce 4:3 laptops.

Matt Kohut from Lenovo blames LCD makers. He says they make much more profit selling panels for TVs than for laptops, so they standardized on HDTV aspect ratios and won't supply affordable 4:3 panels:

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=220

(I have no idea how accurate this is, but other computer makers have given similar explanations.)

I prop mine up with a fan underneath the CPU all day long.

> My $900 TV beats the hell out of my laptops as far as picture quality is concerned (I own a matte screen MBP and a latest Thinkpad). And that's just a TV!

So you expect that a <$2000 computer (where almost all of that money is paying for it being a computer) whose screen can only be 1/8" thick to have better picture quality than a $900 device whose sole purpose is to display video and which has less extreme size contraints?

I agree! The 4:3 screens are much more useful for programming and reading the web, the "chopped off" are good only to watch wide videos. Are notebook users really mostly buying the notebook only to watch videos?

"There's simply no choice" -- I'd say of course, since consumers didn't care when they started to buy the worse ones, the manufacturers rightly concluded that they can kill the more expensive variants completely.

I've read more critiques of iPads that stated: "it doesn't have a wide screen." Were they written by competitors? Or are consumers really already trained to actually desire the worse?

I've heard it has to do with the fact that the majority of demand for LCDs comes from televisions, so laptop manufacturers can't buy decent shapes anymore since they don't account for enough demand.

I prefer wide over tall, assuming the same area. I like to view two documents side by side, and it's nice to have two 80-column terminals open on the screen without overlap or tiny fonts.

I'll also always pick two monitors over one large monitor for the ability to separate workspaces.

I hate "wide screens" with a passion - I call them short screens instead. My pet theory is that the LCD manufacturers like short screens better because they can sell fewer pixels while still advertising the same diagonal length.

This seems counterintuitive from a math perspective.

Having a bad math day? A square gives the best number of pixels per diagonal inch. The farther you get from a square (aka the wider the screen), the less pixels you get, even if the diagonal length stays the same. You can advertise a 22 inch monitor but if it's only 1 inch tall then it's worthless.

A 40 inch monitor that's 1 inch tall would also be useless.

Besides, 4:3 screens aren't square either. Why not demand 1:1 screens? Wide screens are more aesthetically pleasing (for most, not all).

most non-wide screen 17 and 19inch monitors were 1280x1024 which was 5:4 which is even more square. I'd happily buy two 1:1 monitors (no one makes an affordable monitor with more than 2048 pixels wide).

It seems impractical to me. I'd rather just have one screen that's wide but not too tall. It's a lot easier to look across wider things than up and down tall things.

1920 widescreens are not really wide enough for a webpage and a code window. A 2560 widescreen is the obvious answer but they cost 3 to 4 times as much.

You're right. I guess your other suggestion was really still making a "wide screen" but a super high res one out of two squarer ones :-) That seems a reasonable solution.

I have 2560 pixels wide but I have a 27" iMac and sorta consider the screen almost a "freebie" with the computer (considering how little extra the 27" costs). A similar stand alone screen is crazy money though..

Simple solution: buy two monitors. Only costs twice as much.

That's not a pet theory, it's simply true.

Heh, well, I can't think of a good way to prove that one, so I thought I'd be careful not to overstate my case. :)

Widescreens are great as long as you get one that can run at a high enough resolution that you can run things side by side (that point comes much sooner on a widescreen).

Are notebook users really mostly buying the notebook only to watch videos

Yes, that and do a little email and Facebook.

Most people who buy laptops (or any PC) are not programmers.

My Dell XPS 16 has a 1920x1080 screen with RGBLED. It can, quite literally, light up a room. My previous Dell (Vostro 1500) had 1680x1050 resolution. I'm quite liking this laptop, especially since it's $1000 cheaper than a lesser equipped MacBook Pro.

Yeah I'm using a Vostro 1500 running at 1680x1050 - its like 2.5 years old now too. I didn't know finding a laptop with a decent resolution was such a big deal.

I've said this before in other places but I'll say it again.

We get the features we want.

Most companies aren't so stupid that they would cut the features most desired by their customers. When features are cut it's because it didn't hurt sales to cut them. Imagine people wanted great screens on laptops more than anything else, what would happen? Every manufacturer would make a laptop with a great screen. They don't and that means that most people kept buying laptops even when they lost their great screens.

It's pretty basic economics, the market won't bare bad products in the face of competition.

For what it's worth, they recently changed the 15" MBP to have the option of a 1680 by 1050 screen. I don't know if it is an IPS screen but I don't think that it is a cheap TN panel.

It's not an IPS screen, but it does make going in to work and looking at the cheapo sony laptop they bought me incredibly painful. It's quite pretty, but I imagine there is a lot of room for improvement, especially with respect to vertical viewing angle.

The absence of a 1680x1050 screen option on the MacBook was one of the two reasons I didn't buy one when I last upgraded. Now I've just got to decide whether to sacrifice the freedom of Ubuntu for the polish of MacOS.

Just compile needed UNIX software for MacOS, you lose no freedom running OS X as a base OS.

It's a real UNIX, it even ships with Bash...

to be fair, you can customize the shell. I keep mine on the "professional" setting - black background, white text, tcsh shell.

You can always run bootcamp and keep Ubuntu too. :)

I was about to buy a macbook for this very reason, but then found the Lenovo T500 with the same screen (although not LED-backlit).

I bought it off ebay for a fraction of the macbook price (cheap as a 3G iPad)), and I don't worry nearly as much about spilling water on the keyboard as I would with a macbook.

It's sad that this display option is fairly rare on 15" laptops, many either giving you too low resolutions (1366x768) or absurdly high resolutions (1920x1080)

You can still get the T series Thinkpads in 4:3 but the display options are limited.

The new sony z series has a lot of pixels. I don't know much about IPS or colors though, specs from the website below.

The VPCZ117GG/X - 13.1 (33.2 cm) wide (FullHD: 1920 x 1080) ; VAIO Display Premium, LED backlight, Adobe RGB 96% coverage

They aren't IPS, but i saw one at Best Buy and it is really good. It's up there with the MacBook Air on color and viewing angles. Definitely the two best displays I've seen on a laptop in a really long time.

But TVs are no better than laptops when it comes to names/numbers. Models seem to last just a few weeks; then another one comes out with a letter or two added or removed, or the number incremented, or the whole name changed. Often its just another connector, or a different remote, or a software change, or a matte screen.,.

Lenevo has a series on x treemly portable computers called x-something or other which do have a 4x3 screen.

Not anymore; the latest models are all shortscreen.

aha, another shortscreener! You're the first other I've met.

re chopping the top off: LCD manufacturers appear to be transitioning from 16:10 displays to true 16:9 (which i guess is for better movie displays?)... This seems stupid to me as well.

off topic, but speaking of movie displays: This has always bothered me, as both a hacker, and a filmaker: Why do we focus so much an 16:9, 16:10 is mathematically superior to 16:9 [1], why don't we make movies in 16:10?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

I'm not sure it's "mathematically" superior. Maybe aesthetically?

Anyway, aren't a lot of movies in 2.35:1 or something anyway?

The Golden Ratio is actually not very appealing aesthetically. And mathematics doesn't have much to say about comparing screen ratios.

Just to be pedantic, the golden ratio is irrational.

Some obscure technical reason, apparently: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.movies.tech/msg/9e7d...

What about a keyboard layout that at least remotely resembles a real keyboard or uses the FN key intelligently. Like lets make the arrow keys + fn work like page up/down home/end. Instead they make these absolutely insane-o layouts which are impractical and different on every single f-ing laptop even of the same manufacturer. Look at macbooks. All of em. For last 5 yrs. Same keyboard layout AND it is usable because macos does not need the home/end/etc keys instead they have decent combinations. Still solvable by good fn key placements. Also who the hell needs numlock on a laptop. Never seen a single practical reason for it except to annoy the crap out of you "why do some keys make numbers for no good reason".

Just figure that crap out.

And the names are like car names. They don't want to give an impression that a computer is "bad" or "slow" or "crippled". Do you want to tell your friends "I got a Dell Crippled v3" so they go for the insane-o names. But apple has maybe 1000x less component combinations available as a baseline model. Remember they control the hardware, while these vendors sell mish-mashes of different hardwares.

Most of the Asus netbooks have the types of keyboard layouts you refer to (with numlock, scrolllock relegated to Fn+ keys). I don't know about their bigger laptops.