Widescreen laptops are dumb

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 squarer 3:2 aspect ratio, and even though the MacBook Pro is nominally “widescreen,” it also has a slightly taller 16:10 display. Everything else on the market, even most ThinkPads, has now succumbed to the hegemony of 16:9.

I understand why laptop makers have opted for this populist choice. Video is something that all users care about, whether the source material is Netflix, YouTube, or their own high-definition creations. Making video and images look great is also why the majority of displays, laptop or otherwise, are now glossy rather than matte. We tolerate the glare and reflections for the sake of the superior contrast and more appealing saturation of a glossy panel.

But a laptop is more than just a video playback machine. For myself and millions of others, it’s the primary tool for earning a living. We use these machines to read, write, remember, create, connect, and communicate. And in most of these other applications, a 16:9 screen of 13 to 15 inches in size just feels like a poor fit.

Practically every interface in Apple’s macOS, Microsoft’s Windows, and on the web is designed by stacking user controls in a vertical hierarchy. At the top of every MacBook, there’s a menu bar. At the bottom, by default, is the Dock for launching your most-used apps. On Windows, you have the taskbar serving a similar purpose — and though it may be moved around the screen like Apple’s Dock, it’s most commonly kept as a sliver traversing the bottom of the display. Every window in these operating systems has chrome — the extra buttons and indicator bars that allow you to close, reshape, or move a window around — and the components of that chrome are usually attached at the top and bottom. Look at your favorite website (hopefully this one) on the internet, and you’ll again see a vertical structure.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That’s to say, most computer screens were the shape of an iPad when many of today’s most common interface and design elements were being developed. As much of a chrome minimalist as I try to be, I still can’t extricate myself from needing a menu bar in my OS and tab and address bars inside my browser. I’m still learning to live without a bookmarks bar.

With all of these horizontal bars invading our vertical space, a 16:9 screen quickly starts to feel cramped, especially at the typical laptop size. You wind up spending more time scrolling through content than engaging with it.

Some might argue that 16:9 is more accommodating for visual creative tasks, like video or photo editing, but I’ve done both (primarily in Adobe’s software suite) on a laptop, and the wider screen doesn’t help much. The experience is better than when I’m composing an email with acres of disused white space either side of my text, but not by a lot. Lateral space is simply not as valuable as vertical space in desktop apps or on the web.

The exception to my argument comes when you get enough extra horizontal space to allow you to run two (or more) vertical work canvasses side by side. The ultrawide 21:9 desktop monitors are appealing in part because of their ability to comfortably host multiple browser and app windows side by side. They also look quite glorious when gaming or watching movies shot in the cinematic 21:9 format. Multiple monitor setups are worth the investment for similar reasons. But none of that is really true of laptops, which are best used with a focus on one app at a time.

Given that we already have iPads, which continue to grow into complete laptop replacements, I don’t feel it’s necessary for me to advocate that everyone switches to 4:3. It’s good to have variety and diversity, and I’m sure for some people a 16:9 laptop might still be the best option. But I speak as someone who spends an unconscionable amount of time watching YouTube videos on his laptop: the black bars don’t matter. Especially with the latest display technology, and with ever-shrinking bezels, a 3:2 laptop screen, such as on the Surface Laptop, is gorgeous to behold no matter what content you put on it. And it’s a much better fit to the way laptops are used on a daily basis.