Then along came consumerism and the age-old numbers game and sound-bites to woo a technically-inept public. Processors had to be faster, despite everything else on their systems being slow and imbalanced, so gamers could preen their feathers based on how many big numbers they could quote. Along comes a new processor and you have to buy one to maintain respect amongst your peers. Same thing with hard-drive capacity, irrespective of speed, cache, or seek times for given applications, and so on.

Now we have the “Widescreen” must-haves, marketed to Joe Public sold on being able to watch widescreen movies on his/her PC – irrespective of the fact he could watch them anyway. But it does reduce real-estate for the manufacturers and therefore reduces cost, EVEN THOUGH the old 4:3 aspect ratio was originally chosen as the optimal format for motion viewing! But heh, ” I can watch wide-screen films just like the cinema, on my PC” (LOL).

This kind of marketing crap to the ignorants is going on everywhere now, to the point that suppliers and service providers can easily dictate terms, for their own advantage, to the overwhelmingly Ignorant, dumbed-down masses. It’s not about what WE really want any more, it’s whether it can maximise profit and sales by differentiation and sound-bites.

This would be a prime opportunity for a small manufacturer to start building them again. Wouldn’t have to have many options, but they could charge a premium. The issue I think is that the LCD manufacturers simply don’t make them anymore.

I became a little frustrated at not being able to find a decent laptop with a normal screen – for normal people – with normal eyes – who want to do normal things, like work on documents, write, surf the net, design etc, etc,..other than, waste all there valuable time watching dvd’s etc!!
I decided to type ‘I hate widescreen laptops’ into google to see what I could find. What did I find? A site/post that is over 3 yrs old and still going strong. Well done Mike Taber.

Question, Don’t any of the so called heads of marketing, CEO’S of manufacturing companies, Dell, Toshiba, etc, etc,etc, understand that not everybody wants to sit and play games or watch movies all day! Wake up people..your customers are angry, frustrated and damn fed up with this retrograde step! Having to scroll up and down every few minutes is a real pain in the rear! I tried a friends widescreen recently..it drove me crazy. I need a new laptop..not a new desktop, but it looks like I’m being forced down a one way street to desktop land!
I don’t understand these so called marketing people..do they not use laptops on the go? Surely they must do, and so must understand our frustrations. Arghhh!!!

Bottom line though is it’a all about the money. Or why else would they keep pushing such tat and ignore the voice of many!!

A few years ago, 15″ was phased out in favor of 15.4″. During that time, I switched jobs, which meant that I went from a 1024×768 15″ notebook to a 1280×800 15.4″ notebook. Although that was an improvement, it still doesn’t match up to my trusty Asus M6a which has a 1400×1050 screen.

I really HATE the 15.4″ screen of my notebook. 800 pixels is waaay to little for anything other than surfing the Internet. I dislike working at home or going to clients, just because I have to use that awful screen. (And I refuse to invest my salary in an extra screen to use my company-provided laptop at home.)

Anyway, now that my laptop is starting to age, I’m looking for a much better replacement. Quad-core processor, 4 Gig’s of ram and a 64-bit OS. And a screen with at least 1000 pixels in height. Guess what… The problem is getting worse! I noticed that 15.4″ screens are rare on new notebooks. Apparently, business users only want to use their laptops for watching movies in hotels or something, because 16:10 is being replaced with 16:9. This means that where 1280×800 was the default resolution last year, you now get 1366×768. That’s worse. Period. If you upgrade, you’ll get 1600×900, which is worse than 1680×1050. If you spend a lot of money, you might get 1920×1080, but then the pixel density is too high for working comfortably for 8 hours a day.

I think I’m going to write some letters to a few producers of notebooks. (Asus, HP, Dell, Apple, Toshiba, maybe even Acer). I’ll print it in landscape with a tiny font and I’ll end the letter with a statement like: “If this was annoying to read, imagine what it’s like to work like this every day of the year.”

Fortunately there are still normal screens found in the PC market.

The wide screens are very bad for web browsing and developing sites, you need to use the vertical scroll bars all the time and this is very poor.

The next funny thing is that all the vendors and the online shops are saying the wide screen laptops are great for watching DVDs but I hate watching them on my notebook as I already can use my DVD player at home, right?

As you have mentioned it is an economical trick and it’s great many people already know about this.

Hows about it….

Mail me for comments.
Thanks and bye