My MSI from four years ago had a UHD screen:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/

My current Dell XPS15 does as well; both ran/run Linux. I do a lot of photo editing (Lightroom in VM, although I'd started to use Darktable) and I probably wouldn't buy a primary laptop without a UHD display today.

No you don’t need better than 1080p but most developers need crisp text and I would like to go further and 4k 15inch displays would be perfect for me as it would allow me to have smaller text without a loss of quality.

It's a bit absurd to argue that you need a high pixel density to code. It's no longer an insane luxury, but even being a relatively younger programmer I remember 640x480 being the highest resolution my first personal computer could display. What fundamentally changed about programming that now we can't even do it without 200 PPI displays?

Obviously, nothing. High resolution for most people is still just a 'nice to have.' But even 1080p@15" will produce relatively crisp text. I'd argue East Asian languages are the only ones to significantly improve in legibility, as sub-pixel rendering pretty much does what it needs to do for English nowadays.

That being said, I absolutely will always go for high DPI and everything, I just don't think it's sane to argue it's an absolute must for what amounts to typing and reading text.

It’s a bit absurd that you don’t need a roof over your head that isn’t made out of mud... Do you see the idea that people make normal and impossible to live without without it being really “needed” - having a structured that doesn’t put mud into your foor is important not because it’s really necessary but because our standards have improved.

Low res on a CRT looks much, much better than low res on an LCD panel though

True, but not even the superior antialiasing properties of CRT can make 640x480 look better than a 1080p LCD panel.

> I remember 640x480 being the highest resolution my first personal computer could display

<FourYorkshiremen> Eeee, you were lucky. My first personal computer maxed out at 320x256, or 160x256 if you wanted more than 4 colours. </FourYorkshiremen>

> 320x256

LUXURY. We had 32x24 b&w characters and we were glad of them.

(ZX81, nominally 256x192 pixels but only accessible as 8x8 character cells.)

LUXURY. My first experience with programming was some programmable TI (I think?) calculator that had 8-digits LCD screen and a memory of 39 "slots".

In the manual, there were some programs you could type in, including "Mars Lander". The calculator shows a landing speed (e.g. "8.2") and then you need to type the thrust adjustment (e.g. -1.0 or +3.0) and then the new landing speed is shown. If you do it right, you land safely and it shows "00000" or something. But nah, that did not happen, you just crash ("11111")

Following that, when I got ZX-81 with 32X24 screen, and like, 1Kb of memory, I was in heaven :)

I seem to recall that there were characters made up of all the options of quarter squares, so you could have a pixellated display of 64x48 at least

edit: seems like HN doesn't support these characters but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements

I made a 'zooming through a tunnel' program in assembler once, using them

You are, indeed, correct - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81_character_set

Although in the context of developing on small screens, they're not very helpful.

(And if you redefined the character set on the fly, you could make things like Forty-Niner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTTWMIQVznM )

Hey, I did say I was relatively young :) I wouldn't have minded starting on Commodore 64 or Apple ][ or anything, but I missed by a decade or two. Oh well.

You can still do that, these machines are emulated pretty much perfectly.

No you just want fancy things. Whatever, that's fine.

But it's not a requirement for 'most developers' - in fact the ones I know with high resolution laptops don't want them, they're just annoyed by lingering issues with UI scaling and tiny text. I can't think of a sane reason for having font sizes so small that you need 4k to display text properly. Text is plenty crisp at 1080.

Also this is a laptop. More pixels means shorter battery life.

Maybe what you really need is a desktop.

I find it's only crisp enough when I use bitmap fonts, I prefer how vector fonts look on 4K but I'll still buy 1080p for the battery life.

> Text is plenty crisp at 1080.

It looks so much better at 2000. Of course you can get by with 1080 - hell, there've been times when I got by with 600 - but when you can see more code and read it more easily, it's easier to get on with development.

If you mean software developers and not UX designers, that's silly. You get crisp text on 640x480 if you use bitmap fonts.

This is not true at all for 'most developers'. I have a 32" 4k display and I still use DPI scaling. I've also done development on as low as 480p without much of a hindrance. Sure big resolutions are nice, but not at all a must.

I can't say my development really suffers between my hi-res 27" 4k/1440p monitors at home and my 24" 1200p screens at work.

It's low considering that price tag. The reason we didn't get this as normal 10 years ago was because of collusion so it's right to expect in 2018(probably when the next batch ships) to have some good screens.

I read a lot of documents online, and many of those in PDF (often scanned), ePub, or other formatted presentations.

Reading those on a large (9") tablet is doable, in 1-up portrait mode. Reading on a large retina desktop display works -- 2-up mode with excellent resolution.

Reading them on a laptop suck balls. At a 9:16 aspect ratio with 1080 px height, both font and resolution are too low to read clearly. And unless you've got a hybrid laptop (I've been looking at options online, but they strike me as overly fussy and asking for trouble), no-go.

At a higher dot-pitch, this might work, but it's pretty iffy.

Surprisingly, other than the OS and applications, a tablet makes a suprisingly good mobile device. Samsung's announcement that they'll be supporting Linux installs is promising. The other side of this that needs addressing badly is standardising keyboard and case form-factors.

A tablet (display + brains), self-supporting folio case, and bluetooth keyboard isn't quite perfect, but it's quite good. In reality, keys are falling off and/or getting disabled on the keyboard, the tablet itself cannot run a real OS, I'm fighting Android, and virtually the entire App ecosystem is worse than useless.

I bought a laptop with a 1920x1200 display in 2007. It was a 17" Dell, but still, it took nearly ten years before higher resolutions became common.

I'm not paying premium for a device with a worse resolution than my phone's

It's just too narrow. 1200 lines is the bare minimum for my comfort.