Widescreen laptops are dumb


Samsung Notebook 9 Pen

I’ve been thinking about aspect ratios. After years of phones, laptops, tablets, and TV screens converging on 16:9 as the “right” display shape — allowing video playback without distracting black bars — smartphones have disturbed the universality recently by moving to even more elongated formats like 18:9, 19:9, or even 19.5:9 in the iPhone X’s case. That’s prompted me to consider where else the default widescreen proportions might be a poor fit, and I’ve realized that laptops are the worst offenders.

Ask me to name the best laptops on the market, and my answer would be some ordering of Apple’s MacBook Pro, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop and Surface Book, and Google’s Pixelbook. Not coincidentally, Microsoft and Google’s machines have a...

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