What I'm looking for in a laptop has also evolved, it's no longer (just) raw power but battery life, how noisy the fan is, how hot it gets under load, etc... Not sure how the intel chipset handles all this. I'll wait for more in-depth reviews.
I’d take it a step further and suggest 3:2. Yes, more pixels (for matching X-dimension pixels) means more power draw, but you get a slightly increased height which is valuable real estate. And that small bump won’t be that much more noticeable when watching media full screen compared to 16:10. 4:3 offers much more, but it gets a bit silly and letterboxing would get pretty heavy, and if you want to HiDPI the display at 2x, that’s a ton more pixels compared to the sibling ratios.
Examples:
- 1920x1080: 2160 (16:9)
- 1920x1200: 2400 (16:10)
- 1920x1280: 2560 (3:2)
- 1920x1440: 2880 (4:3)
Maybe 1:1 is what you really want, but I've never seen such a laptop :)
Been around a few Surface models, and the 3:2 is pretty nice. I chose to stick with the traditional 16:9 FHD resolution width marker as it’s arguably the most common width for online content in the consumer video space, most common display width, and makes downscaling from 16:9 UDH rather easy. I’d rather have some extra horizontal padding than have the video "squished" or "stretched"(not literally) to fit the display appropriately as it won’t be 1:1 pixels.
Of course, you can always go the Apple/Microsoft way and choose a non-preexisting 16:9 based resolution. But as one who has previously dealt with a lot of video work, I much prefer getting those 1:1 visuals, no resizing needed. Personal preference, and yes, no such display exists to my knowledge in a consumer device. Most people don’t notice or care about this specific topic.
I run my 4K 27" desktop monitor at 150% scaling, and usually snap two windows side by side, sometimes up to four windows with corner snapping. It's like having two portrait mode monitors side by side.
On my laptop, the 1366x768 screen lacks the resolution to do this. Vertical resolution is the key, no matter the form factor.
Swivel/tilt/pivot and multi-monitor brackets make for great flexibility, though. I've seen setups with a 4K monitor flanked by two smaller vertically oriented screens. Or you could stack monitors on top of each other, or a combination.
The biggest setup I've seen at a desk was six 4K monitors, arranged three wide and two tall. When you've got a lot of monitoring to show at once...
all this 1x1 and 4:3 business just sounds like hipster nostalgia to me. granted I'm not a programmer, but we're not all programmers either. it's almost as if there's some virtue signaling going on there. oh the desire to be different in a mass produced world.
Two windows side by side on 1280x1024 are 640 pixels wide each, on 1920x1080 three windows are the exact same width each, plus you get an additional 56 pixels of vertical resolution, so in fact more lines of text.
And of course once you go to 2560x1440 or 3840x2160, you either get oodles of space or sharper text, thanks to display scaling.
20 years on, and there's no chance I'm buying a 1080p laptop no matter the other ideals behind it. If they're targeting the higher end laptop market with lower end specs, I don't think there's not going to be much of a market for them.
Now, I run Linux on a Dell XPS 15 (3840x2400 with a 1.5 fractional HiDPI scale) and it’s acceptable, but still feels a little vertically cramped.
Give me as wide as they come!
But I don't have a square monitor (I think it's 16:9) I don't see why that would be an improvement. If anything surely we want it wider for side by side use, so more 'lanes' can fit?
As for fonts, I always make my text size as small as possible on every device I own (well, the ones primarily used by me at least).
Having a split under your nose feels like reading a book but putting the page you’re currently reading past your ears
Just like 1080p vs 1440p. 2k vs 3k vs 4k. Just like the material of the chassis, the brightness of the screen, the weight, the stiffness, the depth of keytravel, the color scheme of the background, the placement of buttons on your window, using usb-c for charging...
I mean, I could ramble for pages about ideal features. Some of those features are important to enjoying a laptop long into the future. But a lot of them are purely whatever the latest craze is. 16:10 screen imo is of the later category.
Brightness of screen is important if you're not always in an optimally-lit environment. I work from home, I like moving around and going to work at cafes for 1-2 hours. My 250 nits thinkpad, for all the great things it has, can be a pain to use in some circumstances.
Telling me I want 16:10 because the fanzy macs have it is belittling. I want 16:10 because I want to see more lines at once when coding on emacs. Depending on what I work on, I even split my windows horizontally.
Even bundling together usb-c for charging with the color scheme of the background is... puzzling. Surely you can see how some people would like to have only one charger to carry around for all their electronic?
If I had to guess, you have a dedicated desk and don't use any computer outside of it. That's a cool setup, but not everybody can or want to do that.
These are also very important factors for me as well. That's the reason I run my laptops with the cpu governor set to battery saving mode. Since for the work I do CPU is rarely the bottleneck, I get better battery life and I can never hear the fans.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/hp-spectre-x360...