The End of Non-Widescreen Laptops?

Santi Onta writes "Today Lenovo retired the last NON-widescreen laptop they offered (the T61 14.1) from the market, and Lenovo is just an example (Apple, Sony, HP, etc. are the same). I understand the motivation behind all the laptop manufacturers to move to widescreen: they can still advertise that they offer 14.1 or 15.4 screens, but the screen area is smaller, and thus they save more money. Some people might like widescreens (they are useful for some tasks), but any developer knows that vertical space matters! Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity. How can laptop manufacturers still claim that they look after their customers when the move to widescreens is clearly a selfish one? I just wish they offered non-widescreen laptops, even if it were for a plus (that I'd be more than happy to pay)." I've always preferred the widescreen aspect ratio -- vertical matters, but having two nice wide columns always mattered more to me. Until this reader's submission, I hadn't realized that it was such a contested issue. Does this matter?

Pixels Are Your Friend

[kmsigel (306018)]

My laptop screen is wide format (1920 x 1200). With that many pixels you can easily have 4 edit windows up at once (2 x 2 array) with each one having the "standard" 80 columns and 25 lines. This still leaves plenty of room around the edit windows for testing windows, frequently accessed desktop icons, etc.

I admit that stuff on the laptop screen is a bit small (it is ~15 inch diagonal), but when using my 24 inch monitor (which I use 99.9% of the time) the display is a thing of beauty.

Parent Contains Malicious Links!

[by Anonymous Coward]

AVOID THE RDS LINKS!

Anything with http://rds.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] because it is a breeding ground for redirected harmful scripts! Send a message to Yahoo to stop this!

Re:Parent Contains Malicious Links!

[hack slash (1064002)]

If you add "127.0.0.1 rds.yahoo.com" into your hosts file to stop these miscreants from potentially screwing with your computer if you accidentally click on an rds.yahoo.com link, will it have any detremental effect to using any of Yahoo's other services?

Re:Are you kidding me??

[dgatwood (11270)]

Why are ACs allowed to post links anyway? That's just asking for abuse. IMHO, link posting should be limited to non-AC posters. ACs should be there for people to express their own opinion anonymously because of fear of repercussions, not provide links to other people's opinions. AC posts should be the exception, not the rule, and they should be a lot more limited than real account posts as a result.

On the widescreen thing, non-widescreen laptops are going away because of people wanting to watch movies in the car or on airplanes or whatever. That's the only time I'd ever watch a movie on anything other than a large widescreen TV....

Re:Pixels Are Your Friend

[Jeremiah Cornelius (137)]

The amateur who says "vertical space matters" to developers, never ran a comparison diff on his code.

Side by side, my friend. Side by side.

Re:Pixels Are Your Friend

[dnoyeb (547705)]

Vertical space does matter to developers. People even today walk by my desk and laugh at my twisted widescreen HP monitor. They can't possibly see the benefit. Then I drag over a pdf file of a specification document and can read a whole 8.5x11 sheet on that screen while coding on the other screen and they instantly see how well this size matches up.

Plus I am coding in C at work. Sequential code tends to have longer functions and thus you need more vertical space to see the whole thing.

A widescreen laptop is a joke. Laptop screens are too small to begin with. Sure, I like diff on a wide screen. But the majority of my work is not diff. Since a laptop screen does not rotate, I prefer the standard setup. It simply does not fit with the proportions I am used to looking at all day, which is a sheet of paper.

And watching a HD movie on my 15" laptop!?! Haha, what's the point? I'd rather watch it on something designed and comfortable for movie/TV watching.

If you care about vertical space then...

[goombah99 (560566)]

One of my pet peeves about windows is that they layer the tool bars horizontally by default. They even use a menu bar per window.
then they put the widow dock along the bottom along with all sorts of crap. this chews up vertical real estate.

Most of the most poliched linux window managers make the same mistake. It's almost like you have to have virtual windows simply because they mismanage the screen realestate.

DSL linux's default window manager is a notable exception, and is very parsimonious about its use of screen area, presumably because it expected to be used on small screens of older machines.

Apple is better about saving screen real estate, since all windows share a single thin menu bar and the doc can be moved to vertical. Traditionally they use smaller icons and fewer of them so their toolbars usually are single width and thin (some notable exceptions however, like preview.app) Apple even puts the equivalent of tabs on the side of widows rather than the bottom (i.e. the window managers offer sidebars typically).

So perhaps it is not a surprise that apple was an early adopter of widescreen.

In my personal habits, I prefer widescreen because I feel like I can juggle more windows than with a vertical screen. But I get enraged when windows have all sorts of menu crap and tool bars that gobble my vertical screen realestate.

Re:Pixels Are Your Friend

[Blakey Rat (99501)]

And watching a HD movie on my 15" laptop!?! Haha, what's the point? I'd rather watch it on something designed and comfortable for movie/TV watching.

So would I, but the conductor of the commuter train I ride got really upset when I used up a whole row on my sound system alone.

Christ, do Slashdotters never leave the house? Seriously, you can't think of a single place or situation in the entire world where it would be good to watch a movie, but you can't fit a 54" TV?

Re:Pixels Are Your Friend

[SleptThroughClass (1127287)]

So would I, but the conductor of the commuter train I ride got really upset when I used up a whole row on my sound system alone.

The market should take care of that. Just ride a different company's train which supports your sound system configuration, or which offers rental of suitable sound systems.

Re:1680

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

I neverunderstood what's with this widescreen obsession.

People watch DVDs on their laptops.

Just because a few metrosexual stylists decided the newest fad was to have widescreen screens, vendors have thrown actual usability and requirements out of the window.

Um, no they haven't.

Text is harder to read when lines are too wide; browsers won't automatically columnize text (and it'd be kinda useless to do that); I don't need to have things side by side because I work in full screen;

You're choosing to use it incorrectly.

pictures and people accomodate better in 4:3 screens (and I don't know about theirs, but in my town, people is taller than wide)

Not scenery. Not cars. Not... well do I reaaaally need to put down a list of things people take pictures of that you failed to include in your list?

and most of all, the area of vision of our fucking human eyes is more similar to 4:3 than it is to that fucking stylist fad.

Utterly, utterly, wrong. You (and the dipstick that modded your post up) really ought to head to Google and find out a few things like what the aspect ratio of the human eye is or how to make use of a windowing operating system.

Re:1680

[JoshJ (1009085)]

Why are you maximizing your browser? I have my Pidgin buddy list on the upper right, a terminal (partly covered by the browser) on the lower right, the browser taking up about 2/3 of the screen dead center, and my desktop icons are visible on the left.
If I open another window (say a PDF reader or OO.org) it goes to the left of the browser, just wider than a page, so that it overlaps the browser somewhat.

This idea that browsers should be maximized is a disease. Do your part to eradicate it.

A Few More Points to Weigh

[eldavojohn (898314)]

I thought I would add in a few more points that might influence your stance on this. While standardizing on one is great, I think that we should stick to letting the consumer have the option.

At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device). While this may sound trivial, imagine sitting at a desk facing a class of 100+ people who are looking at huge screens behind you. Not only end consumers but also the enterprise prefers the choice. Although this is kind of a non-issue if only Lenovo is doing that because my employer won't buy from China ... what with the phone home possibilities of hardware and all. Oddly enough, half the laptops here are IBM's Thinkpads and the other newer half are Dell XPS's (which ironically spurred the widescreen incidents). Leave it to a Fortune 500 company to waste cash on desktop-replacement-laptops.

And--I'm sure this will come up several times--there is my DVD collection which is mostly widescreen as I have a widescreen TV at home. For this reason, I personally may prefer a widescreen. However, most DVDs are non-widescreen and laptop screens are small enough as it is without having the lost real-estate. Again, probably a trivial aspect unless you travel and watch DVDs a lot.

I do enjoy Warcraft on wide screens though ... something about horizontal viewing that makes me happy. Although I don't do that on laptops or play Warcraft anymore, it may be something to consider.

I agree with the submitter that it is important indeed to leave this decision up to the consumer. Actually, since this is just Lenovo, I wonder if this will hurt their sales? If the consumers want it, the companies will notice ...

Re:A Few More Points to Weigh

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device).

That's odd. All the laptops I use happily show an 800x600 image square in the middle of the screen when hooked up to a projector. (Either that or I can use it as a second screen. Depends on how your laptop is configured.) You may want to play around in the Display Properties and see if you can reconfigure your laptop to handle that situation correctly. In my experience, there are very few widescreen devices that lack support for 4:3 mode with black bars.

Re:A Few More Points to Weigh

[Sockatume (732728)]

One of the things I like about Vista is that it handles external displays (such as projectors) in a very straightforward way. You connect it up, it asks you what you want to be the main display, and defaults both to their default resolutions. That's it.

Re:

[MrMacman2u (831102)]

At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device).

Just a thought here, but have you ever considered... oh, I dunno... changing the resolution of your laptops video out to, perhaps, a "standard" ratio such as 1024x768?

I know, I know, this is just as "extreme" as actually connecting the laptop to the projector in the first place, but really, despite the monumentous stretch of technical wizardry it requires to to actually find and then change the resolution settings to something more appropriate for a projector, it does work wonders for solving that wh

Use a desktop

[KingSkippus (799657)]

any developer knows that vertical space matters!

I suppose there are developers out there who develop primarily on a laptop. Shoot, I'm even one of them, since we only get laptops at my job.

But I have a docking station hooked up to a 19-inch LCD that I do almost all of my work on, and the laptop display is my secondary display I use to keep my documentation, watch windows, etc. on.

I would think that most developers either have this kind of setup or do most of their development on desktops, which are generally more powerful anyway.

Not only that

[dreamchaser (49529)]

What is the actual percentage of the market for laptops who are developers? The summary almost makes it sound like it's the entire user base and that manufacturers are ignoring a huge and important market segment.

It doesn't stick with laptop screens!

[freaker_TuC (7632)]

My suppliers got problems getting the normal LCD screens ; they are all widescreen.
I've been forced to buy 2 widescreen LCD's because none of my suppliers could get me decent 20/22" non-widescreen LCDs.
Pretty annoying when coding overnight through a secure shell session, I must say...

I just wish...

[Thelasko (1196535)]

they were the same aspect ratio as an HDTV.

using a 16:10 as my bedroom tv

[way2trivial (601132)]

is nice, beacuse all the media player apps I use from bed fit their controls into the bottom & top 5% of the screen

media player, VLC, winamp, the dvd software I use... the bars fit perfectly, I can leave them live and watch 16:9 content

X Series

[kotj.mf (645325)]

> Today Lenovo retired the last NON-widescreen laptop they offered

Really? [lenovo.com]

Re:X Series

[skiingyac (262641)]

Also a lot of tablet PCs (the X61t as well as many others) still come in a 4:3 aspect ratio, since that closely matches 8.5" by 11", which makes sense since a tablet is often for either viewing or writing something the standard size of a piece of paper.

Viewing an entire 8.5" by 11" document on a widescreen monitor doesn't work, unless its a 20"+ screen and you view the document in portrait orientation on 1/2 of the screen. I don't think 4:3 screens are going to disappear.

Solution!

[Shark (78448)]

We could all learn to use laptops sideways for coding:

Boss: Why are you lying down?
You: To be more productive!

Wider Screen Tall Screen

[Puls4r (724907)]

I would much rather have a wider screen. Most coders have multiple windows open, and additional width proves more easy for me to use in that case. In addition, long code statements won't fit on a narrow screen and having to scroll sideways to read your code PLUS scroll vertically is a major annoyance. By going wide you removing ever having to scroll sideways - unless you're in excel. It's a big plus for me.

X61?

[outZider (165286)]

I'm on a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet. As far as I can tell, they are still being sold, and it's a standard 12.1" display on the Tablet and the standard model.

macurmudgeon

[macurmudgeon (900466)]

How many people actually write code, or for that matter, any long documents? It mostly about media now days where the ability to watch a wide screen movie is a selling point. And, wider screens are a boon to people who use graphics applications like Photoshop where the extra width gets filled with palettes.

Re:macurmudgeon

[MrMacman2u (831102)]

I'm not a coder, but as someone who regularly works in graphics design, Photoshop, Web Design, Page Layout, etc... a wide aspect ratio screen is completely invaluable and I have found it frustrating to use the "old" 4:3 style screens for some time now.

Your natural tendency is to look left and right, not up and down. I have been informed repeatedly of this by people who have "switched" and now favor the wider screen ratio.

Of course another reason general users probably prefer the widescreen is for viewing movies also, but that's another point all together.

I, for one, will waste no tears in the death knell of the standard aspect ratio.

ugh!

[rantingkitten (938138)]

The problem is that the "widescreen" displays being offered are, by and large, no more wide than were your old displays. That's what ticks me off the most. 1280x1024 was a decent resolution a couple of years ago. But then "widescreen" came out and, oh, what do we have?

1280x900. Gee whiz, thanks! Since it's now clearly rectangular it's "wide", but all they really did was cut off one or two hundred pixels from your vertical rez. Exactly how did I benefit from this? Drives me absolutely insane. Finding laptops above 900 pixels vertical is quite a chore; I know, because I've spent quite a while pricing them out for work and I refuse to go below 1050.

I like my 1680x1050 screens just fine, but they still don't compare to the 1600x1200 screens of yore, which are nearly impossible to find these days. Sacrificing 80 pixels in the horizontal to gain that kind of vertical resolution is fine by me.

I realise everyone's needs and preferences are different, but I am so, so tired of manufacturers touting this OMFG WIDESCREEN garbage like it's the second coming, when in reality it's just as wide as it was before, and significantly less tall.

Brevity. Soul of wit.

[Zigurd (3528)]

Write shorter methods. That is all.

Re:Brevity. Soul of wit.

[slim (1652)]

Write shorter methods. That is all.

I don't know to what extent you were joking, but I agree with this. If your blocks are significantly more than 50 lines long, there's something wrong.

The Linux coding style guide [reptiles.org] contains wisdom on this:

"Functions should be short and sweet, and do just one thing. They should fit on one or two screenfuls of text (the ISO/ANSI screen size is 80x24, as we all know), and do one thing and do that well."

And something similar goes for width:

"Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program."

I must admit to often failing to live up to those ideals, but that doesn't mean they're good aims to have in mind.

Better for Development?

[el_chupanegre (1052384)]

I find widescreen is actually much better for development. I'm mainly programming in Netbeans or Eclipse and having the navigator on one side and the 'outline' on the right is great. On a standard aspect monitor, this leaves the central portion for working on code really small. On widescreen (I use a 20" widescreen) this central code portion is much bigger. It's much the same in Visual Studio.

Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something, I could agree. Even then though, do I really need 100 lines on the screen at once?

I'd much rather have half the lines on the screen and be able to use the extra features of my IDE to aid in navigation and keep my concentration focused on the area that I'm working in.

Yes, it's an issue

[skiflyer (716312)]

Anytime you have competing form factors it's an issue... heck we had a glossy/matte screen thread here just last week. Personally, it's an issue for me, but for different reasons. I want 1000+ vertical pixels. And I want a small form factor that I can easily lug around. To get a 1000+ vertical pixels in a widescreen I need to have a 15 inch screen... 14.1 is my comfort limit. So I lose in this discussion. Not exactly a huge loss though.

Think about the keyboard

[Sniper98G (1078397)]

One thing to consider in this is the keyboard. As laptop manufacturers make their laptops smaller and smaller they are almost required to use widescreens in order to keep the device wide enough to have a useable keyboard.

One-liners

[Ken_g6 (775014)]

if($laptopAspectRatio eq 'Widescreen') { print "all your code on one line!\n"; }

These laptops should make Perl one-liners at least a little easier to read.

Form factor

[Telvin_3d (855514)]

It's not just a case of the manufacturers being selfish. It's a form factor issue.

The biggest limiting factor on a laptop's width is the keyboard. Almost everything else you can shrink and expand without limitation. Resizing the keyboard is not as easy. By messing with the layout you can add or remove a row of keys but that's about it unless you want to significantly shrink the size of the keys themselves.

Add to that the fact that every centimeter of extra screen height equals a matching amount of extra case real estate in front that can't be put to very good use, where as extra width lets you expand the keyboard outward.

So, if you want a more portable laptop any shrinkage is going to have to come from the vertical instead of the horizontal. Also, many backpacks/bags/slip cases have the laptop inserted sideways so one that is smaller in that dimension is easier to get at.

Usability Issues

[Graff (532189)]

Yes this matters. It is well-known throughout the publishing world that wide columns of text are harder to read than narrow columns. Our eyes are more suited to reading narrow columns of text than wide ones and having to jump from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen to read the next column is not optimal. The current generation of widescreen displays and the way text is laid-out onscreen causes you to lose track of which line you are reading and it also causes you to slow down in order to better keep track of your vertical position.

A display with a higher vertical to horizontal ratio makes it easier to read and edit text on. Text columns are naturally narrower so your eyes have less problems tracking horizontally and the columns are also higher which means that there is less scrolling. It also means that menu bars at the top or bottom of the screen or window take up a smaller percent of the vertical presentation, which uses the display more effectively.

Widescreen is better suited to video and pictures than it is for text. It would be nice to have displays optimized for text so that people who work with text can do so more effectively. One thing I try to do to counteract a widescreen is to place as many elements as I can (toolbars, etc.) in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one. By maximizing my vertical space and using the horizontal space to stack bars side-by-side I do what I can to create a narrow, high space for text. It would be much better to have a screen that was oriented this way in the first place but if you can't find one...

Re:Usability Issues

[tepples (727027)]

The current generation of widescreen displays and the way text is laid-out onscreen causes you to lose track of which line you are reading and it also causes you to slow down in order to better keep track of your vertical position.

Newspapers came up with a solution to the mess of long lines years ago: they added multiple columns. Is it that hard to unmaximize a web browser, resize it to half the screen width, and put another page into a second window?

Better for developers

[Kolargol00 (1177651)]

Wide screens might be better for developers these days with heavy IDEs cluttering the sides of the display with palettes, panels, etc. Thus you don't have much surface left for your code (or it is so narrow that you have to vertically scroll a lot more). At least all other devs at my place envy my wide screen... ;)

They are looking after their customers...

[Anita Coney (648748)]

The percentage of coders in the over-all laptop market is probably less than 1%. The vast majority of laptop buyers want widescreen. The better question is why laptop manufacturers would create a line of laptops for such an incredibly small niche.

If you think there is a large market for coder/laptops start up a business yourself and make a killing. I won't be holding my breath on that.

This is my fault...

[eln (21727)]

Sorry guys, ever since I started putting my homemade porn online, wide screens have become necessary.

If you know what I mean.

Re:This is my fault...

[iceborer (684929)]

Sorry guys, ever since I started putting my homemade porn online, wide screens have become necessary.

You know, you don't have to show the entire sheep.

Golden Rectangle

[Bob-taro (996889)]

I don't know if this is a factor in the move to wide screens or not, but supposedly the golden rectangle [wikipedia.org] is the most visually pleasing rectangle. It has an aspect ratio of 1.618.

Why assume it's just to save money?

[artifex2004 (766107)]

The form factor allows for a lot less wasted space below, where the keyboard is, for a device that's overall smaller and easier to carry and stick on small tables. This seems like it was written by someone who never actually carries a laptop around, or just lugs it between desks and plugs it in.

If you're only using it at a desk, why not just buy a desktop and a widescreen monitor that you turn 90 degrees, so you can get full page views? (Actually, there have been laptops offering detachable, rotatable screens, but they have not been that popular)

I just opened my Macbook's terminal window and expanded it to full size. Got 209x53. That's on a 13 inch widescreen, with OSX's nonremoveable menubar and other window dressing, Monaco 10 pt. Unless you've got a cumbersome IDE, is that really not good enough for coding on the go?

We devs are never happy

[Captain Spam (66120)]

Whining Dev: "Waaah! This 1280x1024 screen is too small! I can't see all my code on it!"
Manufacturer: "All right, fine, here's a 1600x1200 screen."
WD: "Wellll... okay, you live THIS time..."
DVD Watcher: "Hey! Why can't I watch my DVDs in widescreen on my laptop?"
M: "Fine, fine, here's a 1920x1200 screen."
DW: "Yaaaaay! And my desktop looks so much bigger, too!"
WD: "HEY HEY HEY! What the hell is this? My screen isn't tall enough now! I want more height so I can see more code!"
M: "But... but that's the exact same screen height you used to have and just bugged for a few minutes ago. It's the width that's-"
WD: "TALLER SCREEN NOW FOR I AM INCAPABLE OF RUNNING MY CODE EDITOR NOT-MAXIMIZED AND IT IS WHOLLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE FOR ME TO FIND OTHER USES FOR THE EXTRA WIDTH"
M: *deep sigh*

Dual monitor support

[PMuse (320639)]

Just think of widescreen as bonus. Your previous machine had a 4:3 area of 1024x768. Your new machine has a 4:3 area of 1066x800. Plus, it has a 213x800 sidebar. Why are you complaining about that?

What you should be complaining about is the inability of Windows and many of the apps to negotiate a dual-monitor configuration.

1. Will the dialog box appear (a) centered in monitor 1, (b) centered in monitor 2, or (c) split across them at the mean of the monitor 1 + monitor 2 coordinates?
2. Got that figured out? OK, now swap the left-right positions of monitors 1 and 2 while the apps are running. Where will that dialog box show up now?
3. If monitor 2 is removed, how will you get the apps being displayed there to redisplay themselves on monitor 1?

It's long past time that Windows and its apps got some standards of behavior in the multi-monitor world.

Simple solution

[CODiNE (27417)]

Put the laptop on it's side. Now you've got the tallest laptop screen in the coffee shop man. Everyone will be all "Ohhh is that the new Mac laptop I heard about?"

Re:13" MacBook Pro

[by Anonymous Coward]

I want a Unicorn. They won't give it to me. Instead I get a horse with a candle stuck to its head. What's your point?

Re:13" MacBook Pro

[krog (25663)]

I just posted a link above, reporting on the MB Air's shitty market performance to date. Here are a couple more.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/02/12/resellers-say-macbook-air-sales-arent-as-brisk-as-original-macbook/ [crunchgear.com]
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/165960/macbook-air-sales-deflated.html [pcpro.co.uk]

I can't locate sales figures for the 12" PB G4, but I can state anecdotally that I saw many of them, with satisfied owners. A reasonably fierce following, too. [petitiononline.com] Conversely, I have not seen a single MB Air nor do I know anyone, including all members of a Mac users' mailing list I am on, who owns one or even wants to. I don't think Apple chose the most profitable market segment here.

Re:Move to Widescreen

[WuphonsReach (684551)]

Most if not all companies who are shipping laptops, Apple, IBM, Dell, etc... Are purchasing or sourcing their LCD panels to a third party. There are only a handful of companies left producing LCD panels.

That basically covers the issue. Because of the large (due to the HDTV push) number of widescreen panels being created, economies of scale are coming into play. Which means that with less and less 4:3 ratio glass being created, prices on 4:3 are going up while 16:9 and 16:10 glass is getting less expensive.

(Personally, I like my widescreen T61. It's almost enough that I can keep two documents side-by-side on the screen instead of shunting the 2nd document off to a 2nd display.)

Re:The griper is making an assumption...

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

Why does Bose spend their R&D budget on better speakers?

Woah, when did Bose start doing that?