Back in The Day, I got 80 columns and 25 rows on the VT100 terminal, and had no problems programming. Loved it, in fact. (Although anything less than 9600 baud was kind of painful) While I definitely agree about the 300 pixels at the bottom, and I miss my ThinkPad T42 even compared to my 17" MacBook Pro, life as a developer is great! Emacs still works, I can read documentation AND code AND the documentation is all prettified HTML with links you can click on. OpenGL hardware acceleration makes stuff so much easier now than what I had 10 years ago. On the Windows side, Intellisense is getting pretty good, as is Eclipse/NetBeans if you use Java. And while the widescreen misses some pixels, for UI work, it's almost like having two monitors, if you keep your code to about 80 characters and your app small. Plus, you can watch widescreen movies if you get tired of coding :)
Yes, my code always takes up the full height of the screen and only part of its width, but I use the remaining space for keeping documentation, utilities and the app I am developing open alongside my code. I wouldn't go back to 4:3 at all.
I develop on Debian running on a MacBook Pro. Sometimes the screen size bothers me, but the laptop being bigger would probably inconvenience me more.
I might be an unusual case, but perhaps what you imagine the market for developers to be isn't the actual market for developers.
How do you scroll up in a terminal window?
moe: "...a terminal window"
Redundancy alert!
I've been using Shift+PGUP for ages and absolutely despise Laptops where it's buried under FN+Cursor - which usually requires both hands to press.
Perhaps there's an alternative key combination that I don't know about - which is part of why I ask.
And there's no such thing as a ThinkPad X51.
As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development. Widescreen knocks out 90% of the choices, and that overlaps with the 90% who break up the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn block that programmers need to be sitting up there intact under our right pinky.
Dell Latitude and Lenovo's T series were keeping me alive for several years there, but both of them are now getting skinnier and wider to the point where I dread having to buy a new dev machine.
Worse, netbooks have pushed small notebooks completely out of the market. There is simply no modern equivilent to the ThinkPad X51, with its tons of power, intact keyboard, 4:3 aspect ratio, bombproof steel case and 12" size.
Here's hoping things will change...