I hear this complaint a lot and I think it's based on a flawed premise.

Taller aspects might be better on very small screens that only fill tiny portions of your vision but on bigger screens -- the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer -- you want wider not taller. It's the only way to usefully use your field of view. This is why wider aspects exist.

On my 16:9 aspect 27" desktop screen, my vision is practically filled in the vertical direction -- it is easier to glance to the horizontal edges than the vertical ones. I would use more horizontal space before I used more vertical.

And this is the point of wider aspects -- they use your eyes better. If you buy three screens for your desktop, you don't stack them vertically -- you arrange them horizontally so you can actually see them.

People who keep asking for squarer displays for work should simply get bigger displays and stop pretending that a 13" laptop display is ever a good choice for a working display.

Frankly, anything sub 24" is not a working environment. Anything smaller is either (a) something you use occasionally when you're not at your desk or (b) for people who are not working.

Could you go into more detail on this? I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous. Basically, if there's some kind of ergonomics concern I'm prepared to change, but not otherwise.

> wider aspects -- they use your eyes better

Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.

It's true that in reading, we're only good at scanning approximately 8-10 words per line. This is why letters are the width that they are. But I'm not talking about making a single document fill the width of the screen. That document behavior is a relic of a small-screened world.

Modern computer working environments (particularly programming) generally involve opening a few different documents simultaneously and having them open side-by-side. Multiple editors, browser windows, debug tools, documentation, file-trees, etc. This all needs to go somewhere. It is easier to place these separate documents side-by-side than stacked vertically.

> I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous.

Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window but if you've ever wanted to edit two documents side-by-side there's little you can do on a screen that small. You're pigeonholing yourself into a mono-tasking environment because you don't have the real-estate to present multiple documents simultaneously.

No, neither of these things are the case. I'm currently working with Xcode, Blender, terminals and a debug app, as well as my internet distractions, and it's not slow. I do make heavy use of virtual desktops and cmd-tab, and when I was working on a dual-screen workstation I found that most of my work centred on a single screen because I would rather move the app than scan the screen. For me at any rate, a large spatial organisation is visual clutter, and lends itself to hunting for information, whereas the apparent bottleneck of cmd-tab actually sorts information efficiently.

I'm not sure if this is making sense, I'm going down with a cold and focus has gone out of the window in quite a different sense today, but there's my 2c.

8:5/16:10 or even 3:2 fill the horizontal field of view well while also delivering more vertical space.

Even if 16:9 is theoretically better, why shouldn't we have a choice? Every notebook computer out there besides Apple has a 16:9 display, and I'm sick of it, and many others are as well. At least offer us more than one choice.

Let's hope Lenovo takes a look at this. I'd love a Thinkpad with a high-res screen, 3:2 display, and of course, the venerable TrackPoint and keyboard. Touchscreen is a nice novelty feature but really isn't required.

If someone proposes a Kickstarter project for a mobile developer workstation with a solid design, 4:3 high-res screen, pointing stick, and great keyboard, I'll be the first to hop on.

Or maybe I should go ahead and make that Kickstarter project a reality instead of waiting for someone to.

The lack of something like this is why I'm still using a 7 year old Thinkpad.

I really hope that hardware makers will finally realize that the primary reason for buying a notebook is not for watching movies on a 15" screen.

(At this point some wag is going to suggest portrait mode, but I've never seen a laptop with a portrait screen that can be used at the same time as the keyboard).

My thinking is that a screen that's close to square works better for a wider range of tasks than one that's very oblong. A rotating oblong screen that could be tall or wide might work nicely for a lot of situations too, but it would be hard to implement well on a laptop.