The Widescreen Laptop Conspiracy | Hacker News Reader

The Widescreen Laptop Conspiracy

singlefounder.com

70 pointsparenthesis72 comments

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.

Exactly, a year ago I was looking for a small portable laptop and definitely wanted a Thinkpad.

I could choose the X300, X200s or an old, second-hand X61s with 4:3 screen ratio. Then I saw this image: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/34872.jpg

It's so obvious what is best for small laptops. X61s is smaller and has more screen real-estate compared to the 4 times more expensive X300. I think even if Lenovo wanted to go back to 4:3, they can't because of the screen manufacturers.

Another side-effect of the small laptops having widescreen is the lack of wrist support.

"if Lenovo wanted to go back to 4:3, they can't because of the screen manufacturers"

They certainly can, they (or anyone) just would be at a disadvantage in terms of price because of volume (and manufacturing cost, if what I wrote above is to be believed). Considering that laptops are the kind of market where most people only look at price(1), that's not good business.

(1) Except for apple of course. The only think they are better at than design is branding, and they've branded themselves above the price fray.

I did the same thing - bought an older 16:10 model to avoid having to go 16:9. I have a Thinkpad W500 with a 1920x1200 15" screen. If 4:3 screens were still available, I'd have bought one of those. On the bright side, if you're shopping for a discontinued model and screen resolution is more important that other stuff, you can get a phenomenal deal.

Where? I'm looking to get W500 but reluctant to go ebay or some no-name discount site.

Found a few different configurations on Provantage :)

"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.

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... . 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...

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.)

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.

I think that both HP and Dell offer 1920 wide 15" displays. But where I could get 24" display with similar DPI/PPI?

There was an IBM display with ~3800x2560 22" a few years ago. Sadly, it was discontinued some years after being introduced. IIRC 2008 or 2009 some manufacturer wanted to make them again, with a roughly 10k$ price.

Edit: That was the IBM T220/T221. In 2007, Toshiba announced a revival, but didn't end up producing them.

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.

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.

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.

It should be obvious what he means, which is that the number of X in a piece of technology is multiplied by Y every Z <period of time>.

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.

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.

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."

After rereading parts of the article, I concede your point. He is hating on width, but he also complains about lack of vertical height. I may have been sleeping when I read it the first time.

I agree that vimdiff is great on a widescreen. I like it so much that I do all my development with vertical splits now (instead of horizontal splits as I used to). ^w v

Not too wide, too short. A few years ago 1680x1050 used to be a quasi-standard for good 15" displays. Now you're lucky to get 1600x900.

I had a 17" powerbook for years with a width of 1440 and it drove me mad because I couldn't quite get 3 80-column terminals to fit comfortably (I think I settled on 2 79-column and one 80). Today my minimum width is 1600 pixels, precisely because the way I develop involves having multiple files open, each in their own terminal, all side-by-side. I can never understand people who only have one file visible at a time, but I guess they'd probably think I'm mad too...

As for height, how many lines of code do people put in a function? In the languages I tend to use, functions of more than fifteen or twenty lines are a bit excessive, and probably need to be refactored. Why is there so much demand for vertical real-estate?

Yeah, everything is switching to the 1080p TV glass. I bought a Dell Latitude this year just before they switched as well. Those 120 pixels really make a difference.

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...

Speak for yourself. I do all my web- and application development on laptops and desktop systems with wide screen monitors and I love it.

Yes, my code always takes up the full height of the screen and only part of its width, but I use the remaining space for keeping documentation, utilities and the app I am developing open alongside my code. I wouldn't go back to 4:3 at all.

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.

ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys

How do you scroll up in a terminal window?

avar: "...Emacs"

moe: "...a terminal window"

Redundancy alert!

No, I meant in bash. I guess as a developer he spends some time there (that might be a false assumption, of course).

I've been using Shift+PGUP for ages and absolutely despise Laptops where it's buried under FN+Cursor - which usually requires both hands to press.

Perhaps there's an alternative key combination that I don't know about - which is part of why I ask.

In Terminal.app I just wave my fingers over the track pad to scroll. However 99.9% of the time I'm in a screen window which maintains its own buffer. Fn + Up/Down is Page Up/Down in most applications I've used.

I can't speak for others, but I usually run a M-x shell process in Emacs.

All of my bash shells are run in GNU screen. So scrolling up is C-a [ to enter copy-mode. Then C-u to scroll up and C-d to scroll down.

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

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

> As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development.

Back in The Day, I got 80 columns and 25 rows on the VT100 terminal, and had no problems programming. Loved it, in fact. (Although anything less than 9600 baud was kind of painful) While I definitely agree about the 300 pixels at the bottom, and I miss my ThinkPad T42 even compared to my 17" MacBook Pro, life as a developer is great! Emacs still works, I can read documentation AND code AND the documentation is all prettified HTML with links you can click on. OpenGL hardware acceleration makes stuff so much easier now than what I had 10 years ago. On the Windows side, Intellisense is getting pretty good, as is Eclipse/NetBeans if you use Java. And while the widescreen misses some pixels, for UI work, it's almost like having two monitors, if you keep your code to about 80 characters and your app small. Plus, you can watch widescreen movies if you get tired of coding :)

I'm on a 16:9 ratio "notbook" (ThinkPad x100e) and with xmonad set to split a two-up view at the golden ratio, I get a 80 columns on the left pane (for certain values of Terminus). Love it.

16:9 displays fit human field of vision better. This isn't a hardware problem, it's a software problem.

And there's no such thing as a ThinkPad X51.

X61, sorry. They're a few hundred bucks on eBay these days, and can give a modern 17" laptop a run for its money if you max out memory and give it a fast hard drive:

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=ThinkPad+X61

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

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.

widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing screen area

Huh?

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

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 ...

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).

Programmer seems generous, he seems more concerned with writing word docs and running Visio architect.

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...

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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

Still? I've been checking their site for a ~15" wuxga laptop, but all seem to be "HD".

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Except he's talking about laptops.

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