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The End of Non-Widescreen Laptops?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday April 21, @10:14AM
from the aspect-ratios-give-me-shivers dept.
Displays Portables
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?

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  • Pixels Are Your Friend (Score:5, Informative)

    by kmsigel (306018) * on Monday April 21, @10:15AM (#23142848)
    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.

  • Use a desktop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by KingSkippus (799657) * on Monday April 21, @10:19AM (#23142974) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • I just wish... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thelasko (1196535) on Monday April 21, @10:20AM (#23142988) Journal
    they were the same aspect ratio as an HDTV.

  • X Series (Score:5, Informative)

    by kotj.mf (645325) on Monday April 21, @10:20AM (#23142996)
    > Today Lenovo retired the last NON-widescreen laptop they offered

    Really? [lenovo.com]

  • Solution! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Shark (78448) on Monday April 21, @10:21AM (#23143016)
    We could all learn to use laptops sideways for coding:

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

  • macurmudgeon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by macurmudgeon (900466) on Monday April 21, @10:22AM (#23143068) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrMacman2u (831102) on Monday April 21, @10:25AM (#23143134) Journal
      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.

  • Brevity. Soul of wit. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zigurd (3528) on Monday April 21, @10:22AM (#23143074) Homepage
    Write shorter methods. That is all.

    • Re:Brevity. Soul of wit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by slim (1652) <john@hart n u p . n et> on Monday April 21, @11:12AM (#23144276) Homepage

      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? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by el_chupanegre (1052384) on Monday April 21, @10:25AM (#23143142)

    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.

  • Form factor (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Telvin_3d (855514) on Monday April 21, @10:31AM (#23143316)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Graff (532189) on Monday April 21, @10:32AM (#23143344) Homepage
    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...

  • They are looking after their customers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anita Coney (648748) on Monday April 21, @10:34AM (#23143388)
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

    by eln (21727) on Monday April 21, @10:36AM (#23143442)
    Sorry guys, ever since I started putting my homemade porn online, wide screens have become necessary.

    If you know what I mean.

  • Golden Rectangle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bob-taro (996889) on Monday April 21, @10:48AM (#23143750)

    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.

    • 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.

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