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]

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.

A Few More Points to Weigh

[eldavojohn]

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 ...

X Series

[kotj.mf]

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

Really? [lenovo.com]

Re:A Few More Points to Weigh

[AKAImBatman]

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.

X61?

[outZider]

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.

Parent Contains Malicious Links!

[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:Are you kidding me??

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't even think about clicking that.

Re:Move to Widescreen

[WuphonsReach]

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:A Few More Points to Weigh

[MightyYar]

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

Shouldn't they direct their contempt toward the software that is clearly lacking? One should be able to view any image in any aspect ratio - just display some black bars at the sides. Powerpoint 2004 does a fantastic job - it displays full-screen on the presentation device, and then gives you a sort of presentation control panel on the laptop screen, with a picture of the current slide, plus what slide is up next, and navigation controls... as well a sidebar with the entire presentation so that you can jump around if you want.

Personally, I like the widescreens. MacOS seems designed for it... that dock fits great on the left or right when you have a widescreen. Even the stupid Vista sidebar seems to assume you have space on the side. It also seems more natural for programs that keep a lot of toolbars open, such as photoshop.

Usability Issues

[Graff]

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...

Grammar nazi says:

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn the difference between "less" and "fewer."

Better for developers

[Kolargol00]

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... ;)

I prefer widescreen laptops for development

[Jimmy King]

While vertical height matters and is definitely useful, I find myself hindered more by lack of width than height these days. Try working on code in one window, with some reference code in another window, and maybe a website with the online documentation in another window without widescreen on a 15" or smaller monitor. Of course, you can mess about minimizing and maximizing back and forth, but a lot of times it's far more productive to be able to have at least 2 of those up side by side while maintaining enough width of the window to show the majority (or all) of the relevant lines of code.

Also, using a modern IDE like visual studio or eclipse on a 15" monitor can be somewhat miserable. Those are clearly designed to be used on a widescreen monitor, imo given the default layouts and how small your code window ends up.

Buy Small Business Notebooks! (Dell/HP)

[lazy-ninja]

If you go through the small business sections of many computer companies sites you will find that they offer a lot of the features they took away from the home market. They are also often better machines for around the same price (if you spec/quote carefully). This is similar to the glossy vs matte screen post from last week... Example Latitude D530 from Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d530 [dell.com]

Re:A Few More Points to Weigh

[Knuckles]

That is fine for you, but try teaching this to a PHB...

It might take some fiddling with the graphic driver (screen control application), but it should be possible to set up the laptop in such a way that it deals with the situation automatically.

We faced the same problem and were able to make it work (with the ATi control panel on Mobility Radeon X1300)

Re:I just wish...

[zachtib]

There's a reason for this. It's so they can still display 4:3 content easily without distortion for instance, i just ordered a laptop with a 1920x1200 display, so it can show a 1600x1200 image in the center of the screen likewise: 1280x768 -> 1024x768 1680x1050 -> 1400x1050

Re:A Few More Points to Weigh

[Sockatume]

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:Brevity. Soul of wit.

[slim]

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.

Re:13" MacBook Pro

[krog]

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:A Few More Points to Weigh

[Knuckles]

Data transfer rate, I suppose. According to Wikipedia, DVI can do up to 2.75 megapixels with a pixel clock frequency of 165 MHz. Too lazy to do the math, but seems like a lot to me.

We have our NEC projectors attached to the 100 Mbit ethernet and can access them via an application on the laptop. Works well for presentations, but is too slow for moving pictures.

Re:Parent Contains Malicious Links!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. For those interested, it's a fine website of the GNAA variety. Spawns a number of singing and dancing pop-up windows. Flash and quicktime was observed. There, now y'all don't have to be as stupid as me :)

Re:A Few More Points to Weigh

[Firethorn]

The quickest answer to this I think would be to take a walk through the AV section of a Walmart type store.

90% of their TV offerings today are widescreen. I'd expect their DVD offers to follow the same trend.

Much ado about nothing

[Junior J. Junior III]

I'm a developer. Widescreen also means longer lines of code before wrapping, so less vertical scrolling.

I'm not all that put out, honestly. I've got a 1680x1050 widescreen on my laptop, and if it were 1600x1200 I'd get a few extra lines of text, but big deal. My previous favored resolution was 1280x1024, so I actually get more pixels in both dimensions.

I can also watch 16:9 movies on it when I'm not coding, and I like that feature more.

Re:Wider Screen Tall Screen

[swillden]

In addition, long code statements won't fit on a narrow screen

Two words: Line breaks

They not only make your code fit better on a narrow screen, they also make it more readable. Also, if you're indenting so far that you need the horizontal space, you really should refactor -- your function is too complex.

Although the old standard of 80 columns is no longer required for printing, it's still a pretty good idea.

The real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that they can charge the same amount for less area, it's that widescreen TV panels have taken over the fabrication plants. No one makes 4:3 anymore - the suppliers have dried up.

Also, there is usually no less vertical space on a widescreen. The have higher pixel density instead. For example:

Standard SXGA+: 1400x1050
Widescreen WSXGA+: 1680x1050

Re:If you care about vertical space then...

[justthinkit]

Vertical menus take more room. In this Opera window I have menu words of "File Edit View Bookmarks Widgets Feeds Tools Help". If I ran the menu vertically, the word "Bookmarks" would force the menu to take up at least 1" of window width. With the menu as it is, it has a width of maybe 3/8". I hear what you are saying about toolbars, and on my 1920x1200 Acer I minimize/consolidate those as well but top menus use less overall space -- hard to get around that without moving to Kanji.