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Comment by james-skemp | Hacker News Reader

A search against the comments returns no results: 2304×1440 resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio?

Showing a few co-workers and a quick suggests what I thought: a bit of amazement at 16:10. Does anyone have any insight into why they didn't go with a 16:9 ratio?

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This site has a fairly good explanation of the benefits of 16:10 http://sixteenbyten.com/

16:10 is better than 16:9 for anything but watching movies because the screen would be as wide anyway, so the 16:9 turns into a reduced height display. Furthermore watching movies with a little black stripes above and below the video is not so bad.

Achieving 16:10 by taking a standard 16:9 resolution and making it less wide rather than making it taller is not better.

16:10 is a much better ratio for working compared to 16:9.

Can you explain? I'm interested why this is. Is there any research into this?

Do you need research to appreciate vertical screen real-estate? I have two 16:10 monitors and love the extra space. I loved it enough that I then flipped one of my 16:10s into portrait.

It's occasionally problematic in that pages I make sometimes pack the perfect amount in on my display, and get cut off on 16:9s.

I don't disagree with you but your argument seems to promote the idea that 4:3 would be even more ideal for the same screen size because it has more vertical screen real-estate. I don't think you answered the question at all.

Obviously it's subjective, but I'd prefer a machine with a 4:3 display, because when I'm coding or reading I need vertical real estate much more than horizontal.

I always assumed that the move to 16:9 for computers was driven mostly by either manufacturing economies of scale or the coolness factor of HDTV's.

Lots of good info about ThinkPad's switch to 16:9 here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20111030050311/http://www.lenovob...

ThinkPad loyalists would kill for a modern ThinkPad with a high-res 4:3 display. This is how they used to be sold, and the extra vertical screen real estate (16:12) was great for work.

Lenovo's blog post at the time:

http://web.archive.org/web/20111030050311/http://www.lenovob...

> PC vendors have almost zero say in this change. We simply have to adapt. As much as I would like it to be so, 4:3 is not coming back.

Apple has since gone on to sell hundreds of millions of 4:3 iPads, so this argument doesn't hold much water. Where there's a will, there's a way. Further dilution of the ThinkPad from a pure "business" machine.

Personally I've transitioned into splitting windows in half when I'm writing code or reading anything substantial. At 16:9 this is more than effective.

I mean, the only thing I can see in favor of this is that 16:10 is better for working because it has more resolution, but that's not arguing for that aspect, only for more resolution.

Would you take a screen that was 1728*1080?

If not, then standardize on 16:9, get a higher resolution screen.

Going from 1920x1080 (16:9) to 1920x1200 (16:10) is better because you get more vertical estate. But you seem to suggest that 1728x1080 (16:10) is also better. Aspect ratio does not automatically make a resolution better lol.

Aspect ratio has nothing to do with resolution. 16:10 is much closer to the golden ratio, which allows to split the screen vertically in half and give two vertical screens with roughly the same ratio again.

16:10 has proportionally more vertical screen space, which is much more important given that most our documents/sources are oriented vertically. Not to mention wasted vertical space that cannot be removed (toolbars/menus/etc). Having more horizontal space is useless if you're mostly working/viewing with a single document at a time. If you physically rotate the screen, the 10:16 ratio is again better at fitting a piece of a A4 paper.

The 16:9 ratio was driven by consumer demand, but no professional user I ever met liked it for working. There's a lot of unused horizontal space in just about every scenario. I personally stuck on 4:3 as long as I could, then switched to 16:10. Admittedly, 16:10 is "good enough" for me that I wouldn't necessarily go back to 4:3 now.

I'm not a Mac person at all, but I greatly envy this, uh, aspect of their computers. The code I work with is vertical, not horizontal, so having more vertical space is good.

It might be fun to take a cardboard box or something and make a "vertical" stand for your macbook. You could keep it constantly rotated 90 degrees for code reading. :)

I for one still miss the 4:3 on the thinkpads. 16:10 sounds good.

Apple uses 16:10 on all of their laptops.

Except for the 11 inch MacBook Air, which is the oddball of the family in that respect.

And which is a lovely little machine (I'm typing on one now) but severely lacking in vertical pixels.

5 out of 6 laptops they currently offer has a 16:10 ratio.

Only the MacBook Air 11-inch is 16:9

maybe it works better for the keyboard and trackpad placement?

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