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macspoofing

> I forgot how much I preferred 4:3 screens for work.

I didn't. I love 4:3 on laptops. I wish more people would rediscover it.

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The Chromebook Pixel line features 4:3. It really is quite nice for browsing pages, reading content, coding, etc.

This was actually one of my reasons to abandon Android tablets.

I wanted 4:3, but all that was offered was 16:9 or 16:10.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 2048x1536 Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 2048x1536 Nexus 9 2048x1536

I have the Nexus 9 and that was the final nail in the coffin ;)

The Pixel C had something closer to a 4:3, if memory serves.[0]

[0] The wiki page said it's actually a 1:√2 ratio.

It was priced absurdly high for a tablet on a platform with terrible in-app tablet-support though.

The Surface line have 3:2, it's definitely a step up from 16:9.

Yeah the aspect ratio ended up being one of my favorite things about the Surface Book (surprisingly enough, to me)

I fear this battle is already lost, though. Lots of IDEs expect wide screens and place plenty of tabs on the side of the code window. On a laptop, it probably sucks, but on a desktop, you can just have a widescreen monitor that's taller and wider (physically and in resolution) than the 4:3 of old, so you basically have a 4:3 code window with a bunch of toolbars on the sides.

On a desktop, you can fairly easily obtain displays that will fill your entire field of view, so the aspect ratio doesn't matter so much. When it comes to laptops, there's much more of an optimization problem; it therefore seems strange to me that there's so little variety on the market, as different users certainly have different needs.

What are the selling points? It's been a really, really long time since I used one but I feel like side by side work would be constrained by it.

Generally speaking you're only going to be able to fit two source files side-by-side on a ~13 inch laptop screen regardless of the aspect ratio. So the advantage of a 4:3 or 3:2 (which is what Microsoft's Surface line uses) is a little more height and a little less width than 16:9. Usually this means taking away some of the unused gutter space to the right of each source file you have open (less horizontal space) and giving you more visible lines of code (more vertical space).

The bottom line: more visibility of source code.

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