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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why you want 4k resolution with a 14 inch screen to use commandline tools and a browser.

My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks

Especially for the command line and a browser which are primarily rendering text, pixel density matters so much! Why look at pixelated text when you can have print-quality crisp text? I never want to go back to low pixel density displays!

I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?

I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!

The reason is because 99% of people care more about battery life and performance than sub-retina-scale imagined problems.

I'm holding my phone as close as I can to my face and I can't see a pixel if I want to

Pixel density is important for crisp small text, so cli on a 14 inch screen and maybe web browsing would be good reasons for a 4k display - it would be the only reasons for me at least.

why do you need crisp text for cli? cli works just fine in 180p still

Because I like my text to look good

you can tell the difference between 4k text and 1080 text? I cant.

There hasn’t been an instance where I couldn’t tell the difference

For the same reason your PC screen likely has more than 480p resolution even though you technically don’t need more than that, why you have stereo instead of mono sound, and more than one CPU core.

>I'm not sure why you want 4k resolution with a 14 inch screen

You do realize we had 1440p phones in 2015-2016 right?

HiDPI is not new, and it's clarity amazing. Stop buying huge low res screens for ripoff prices in 2025

You do realize your battery is dying faster right?

Laptops have had 120hz screens since 2011. Stop limiting yourself to 60hz in 2025

(See how that sounds?)

I wouldn't say 4k is a hard requirement for me but before I bought an M1 I remember "not 720p" was a lot to ask for in the x86 world.

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