The End of Non-Widescreen Laptops? 668
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Are you kidding me?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Side by side, my friend. Side by side.
Re:Pixels Are Your Friend (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Pixels Are Your Friend (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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As for your sideways widescreen monitor, niiice. I want one. It would be perfect for writing papers on. Write LaTeX on one monitor, compile
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Oh, I run diff -y once a week or so. But I scroll around in source code hourly. Vertical space does matter a whole lot more.
When I code, I always keep emacs on the left half of my screen, and a terminal window (for running make, unit test etc) son the right half. In the terminal, I run screen(1) so I can have easy access to man pages and so on.
I'm not sure what I'd
Re:1680 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:1680 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I, on my hand, would like to question if you really need your buddy list constantly visible, or, for that matter, if you really need to constantly reserve space for a potential PDF document. Wouldn't it be better to use that space for the browser while you're not actively reading the PDF?
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Peripheral. It's phonetic. \p-'ri-f(-)rl\. Don't blame the spell checker when the problem is clearly yours. Hell, Google knows what you mean by "perephriel", but that's only because Google's been filtering the sewers of humanity since it was switched on. If it ever goes sentient, we're all fucked.
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Maybe I was not clear enough. I meant height as in physical height.
What I meant is that your argument about real estate is not the only way of seeing it. You are complaining that the same laptop has less height.
Maybe itÂs that the same laptop now is wider.
A 4:3 14" laptop has 9.16 inches of height. A 16:9 15.4" laptop has 9.24
A Few More Points to Weigh (Score:4, Informative)
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
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
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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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We faced the same problem and were able to make it work (with the ATi control panel on Mobility Radeon X1300)
Re:A Few More Points to Weigh (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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 jum
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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
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The OP accused manufacturers of going widescreen to save money, but the truth is that the market wants widescreen because there is now so much widescreen content. 4:3 laptops just don't sell any more except to niche markets (pretty much corporate-only). Most corporate users
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I dunno what dvd's you are buying, but most of mine are widescreen. Thankfully, most movies are coming out at their true aspect ratio...and even some old dvd's are being reissued in true aspect instead of the pan and scan they came out on originally. I hate missing out on so much of the picture.
A lot of tv shows, older ones are in a square aspect...but, most new shows I'm seeing are being prepped for HD...and are in a widescreen aspect ratio.
So, there are some tha
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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.
Tell me, how do they get on with getting assurances that the motherboards aren't made in China and the final product assembled elsewhere?
(This is a genuine question; I was under the impression that Dell bought most of the components from China then assembled them close to the customer in order to maintain their "build-to-order" business model).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
90% of their TV offerings today are widescreen. I'd expect their DVD offers to follow the same trend.
Use a desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't stick with laptop screens! (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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I just wish... (Score:5, Insightful)
using a 16:10 as my bedroom tv (Score:5, Interesting)
media player, VLC, winamp, the dvd software I use... the bars fit perfectly, I can leave them live and watch 16:9 content
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Yes it matters (Score:2)
At home, more and more gentlemen's videos are being shot in widescreen. So it makes sense at home but not at work.
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X Series (Score:5, Informative)
Really? [lenovo.com]
Re:X Series (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Aim for the lowest common denominator (Score:2)
However, I am afraid they have to go with the lowest common denominator, that is people watching DVDs. Widescreens make sense if computers are DVD players that can check email.
Solution! (Score:5, Funny)
Boss: Why are you lying down?
You: To be more productive!
Wider Screen Tall Screen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
X61? (Score:3, Informative)
Non-issue (Score:2, Interesting)
macurmudgeon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:macurmudgeon (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard this theory before but it's definately not true in my case, and I suspect a lot of other people (that's assuming the theory isn't complete BS). It seems to have been invented when they came out with widescreen TVs originally, a few years ago... salesmen used to use it as part of their patter.
I really notice the missing top/bottom on widescreen displays - sure they're cheaper but you've lost data.. instead of creating a 1280x1024 di
ugh! (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brevity. Soul of wit. (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux coding style guide [reptiles.org] contains wisdom on this:
Move to Widescreen (Score:2)
It won't take much to force wide screen panels down the consumers throat. If one of the big names stops offering traditional panels, and then a second large laptop company follows suit, it won't be long before the price of normal LCD's goes way up in price. At that point watch for the rest of the manufact
Re:Move to Widescreen (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Better for Development? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Right.. (Score:2)
Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity.
Muahaha, who ever scrolls? I don't scroll when I code, when I look for something I / or * it, n/N my way through occurrences etc.. Surely I'd rather have it occupy my entire screen than a 80x25 terminal, but when I code I care more about horizontal space because when line breaks things look more confusing, so if anything you'd rather see me coding in an elongated window, something like 140x25.
Yes, it's an issue (Score:3, Interesting)
For a long time.. (Score:2)
There's like.. one or two good monitors left that are non-widescreen high-res, sold at my favourite manufacturer.
Good for most people (Score:2)
It matters! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It matters! (anecdote) (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about the keyboard (Score:4, Interesting)
Pixels vs inches here. (Score:2)
My brand-spanking new ThinkPad T61p sports a 1920x1200 widescreen.
This is more screen real estate than my last ThinkPad, an A31p (1600x1200)
I can view EXACTLY the same number of lines of code on each of them. Except now, if I have a line that's slightly longer than 1600 pixels, I can look at it without scrolling.
Sure, physical-height-wise I have less screen. Big fscking deal. My vision is perfect. So I can enjoy maximum resolution without squinting or needing the
I want 4:3! (Score:2)
One-liners (Score:3, Funny)
These laptops should make Perl one-liners at least a little easier to read.
Form factor (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Would I be right in thinking that you tend to work with maximised windows?
I suspect that a great deal of the argument about wide-screen monitors (even if not in this particular case) comes down to those who prefer working with maximised windows, so that the aspect ratio of
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be nice is if I could make my window as wide as I want but have the text within each comment turned into c
The griper is making an assumption... (Score:2)
Developers are also a very small portion of the laptop market.
This is like saying, "Why does Bose spend their R&D budget on better speakers? Don't they know that deaf people don't care about sound quality?"
Personally, I prefer widescreen laptops. Widescreen video looks better, games give me that 'peripheral vision' effect that comes in handy in WoW and FPSs, and I can just hold my laptop sideways for reading e-books and comics and have them be roughly the same di
Re:The griper is making an assumption... (Score:5, Funny)
Woah, when did Bose start doing that?
Better for developers (Score:3, Informative)
They are looking after their customers... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Best of both worlds? (Score:3, Funny)
What about the X series (Score:2)
This is my fault... (Score:5, Funny)
If you know what I mean.
Re:This is my fault... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, you don't have to show the entire sheep.
Not for laptops but... (Score:2)
Not just for cost (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the laptops are adapting to a general tide in the industry. It's probably not economically viable to keep making 4:3 screens. Also, the laptops have an easier time growing horizontally. You can after all offer a better keyboard. But vertically there is nothing you can add at the "other side of the clap" that has user value.
Golden Rectangle (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Nothing wrong with widescreen with ROTATION (Score:3, Insightful)
Widescreen is also great for developers, artists, designers, writers, and many other professionals, since you can rotate the screens and get a vertical, page-oriented layout.
BUT, the problem is that rotation is rarely supported -- not on laptops, or on monitor stands. On graphics cards, it's "supported" usually, but without acceleration, which sucks. How hard can it be to rotate 90% before applying an operation on today's super-fast graphics cards?
Why can't we have it BOTH ways via rotation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems like that whole thing never really caught on though, and I don't see why not? I'd love to have a wide-screen notebook that would allow you to p
We devs are never happy (Score:5, Insightful)
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*
Much ado about nothing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Dual monitor support (Score:4, Insightful)
What you should be complaining about is the inability of Windows and many of the apps to negotiate a dual-monitor configuration.
It's long past time that Windows and its apps got some standards of behavior in the multi-monitor world.
Simple solution (Score:4, Funny)
Developer who LIKES wide-screen (Score:3, Interesting)
Slashdot optimized monitors (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, my MacBook is pretty and trendy and makes me look smart.
Actually, I've come to like the wide-screen format for placing my IM buddy list on the left and OSX dock on the right. It works nicely. Code? Yeah, that's mainly what I look at all day. The center area for content and side areas for BS is the Slashdot model!
Actually... that's the point. Since Slashdot began its been begging for a wide screen monitor. The OEMs are finally giving into the Slashdot imperator by providing Slashdot-optimized widescreen monitors!
Consider Scrolling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:13" MacBook Pro (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We're not talking about iPods and iPhones. Read: MacBook Air demand trails that of original Intel-based MacBook [appleinsider.com], with winners like:
Re:13" MacBook Pro (Score:5, Informative)
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.