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After nearly a year now, my laptop has been discontinued and replaced with a widescreen model (rumored also to be generally more flimsy). I have the highest-end ultraportable Thinkpad which will ever have been made, with a 4:3 screen.
Neat. I don't like widescreens (for computing) in general but beyond that, using widescreen for small displays (12.1") specifically is just a bad idea period. Especially for business/enterprise oriented laptops like the X-series, where presumably a majority people are doing at least some important word processing or coding!
However, it's moot to protest; as I understand it, they changed over because the LCD manufacturers themselves are dropping their 4:3 lines like hotcakes. (sigh) Who watches movies on a 12.1" LCD anyway?
Here's one thing some of you might not have thought of: 8.5*(4/3)=11.3 which makes a rotated 4/3 display almost perfect for viewing letter-sized documents; to fit height-wise, we need to shrink the horizontal aspect to 97%; this is almost ideal because it introduces an implicit margin even for documents which don't have one. (Not having a margin is actually nauseating to me, since my eyes wind up auto-focusing on the wall behind the monitor. Sucks.)
On the other hand, 8.5*(16/9)=15.1, so we need to take the horizontal down to 73% width. Weak.
Now if you're using the more "civilised" A4 paper (notably the default even in many American LaTeX distributions), the story's about the same. 210mm*(4/3)=280mm which is a bit shy of 297mm, but not much! We just need to go down to 94% of height (and maybe a little more for a margin), no biggie. You can see where this is going: 210mm*(16/9)=373mm!!! That's 20% of the vertical, useless.
Now I suppose if you have a large enough monitor the extra vertical space could help for annotations, but I'd really rather have those on the sides anyway, as a simulacrum of marginalia.
Neat. I don't like widescreens (for computing) in general but beyond that, using widescreen for small displays (12.1") specifically is just a bad idea period. Especially for business/enterprise oriented laptops like the X-series, where presumably a majority people are doing at least some important word processing or coding!
However, it's moot to protest; as I understand it, they changed over because the LCD manufacturers themselves are dropping their 4:3 lines like hotcakes. (sigh) Who watches movies on a 12.1" LCD anyway?
Here's one thing some of you might not have thought of: 8.5*(4/3)=11.3 which makes a rotated 4/3 display almost perfect for viewing letter-sized documents; to fit height-wise, we need to shrink the horizontal aspect to 97%; this is almost ideal because it introduces an implicit margin even for documents which don't have one. (Not having a margin is actually nauseating to me, since my eyes wind up auto-focusing on the wall behind the monitor. Sucks.)
On the other hand, 8.5*(16/9)=15.1, so we need to take the horizontal down to 73% width. Weak.
Now if you're using the more "civilised" A4 paper (notably the default even in many American LaTeX distributions), the story's about the same. 210mm*(4/3)=280mm which is a bit shy of 297mm, but not much! We just need to go down to 94% of height (and maybe a little more for a margin), no biggie. You can see where this is going: 210mm*(16/9)=373mm!!! That's 20% of the vertical, useless.
Now I suppose if you have a large enough monitor the extra vertical space could help for annotations, but I'd really rather have those on the sides anyway, as a simulacrum of marginalia.
