Add to that list 3:2 displays. Surface devices have been using this ratio since Surface 3. [1] Now it's the only device that appeals to me because the ratio feels just right.

I wish there were more options for ratios in the stand-alone display market. Rumor has it, Microsoft will be creating a line of Surface displays. [2]

In my opinion 16:9 is unappealing for productive work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface#Model_compar...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117584/microsoft-surfa...

Yes indeed. I forgot about those.

Works great when you spend a lot of time in a code editor with a file navigation pane on the left fourth of the screen. Keeps the code in the center so you don't have to look to the left all day.

Yeah, i miss the days of 4:3 displays on laptops. This reminds me one of my favorite things to do with 2x 1080p monitors is orient one of them vertically. It works great for documents and code.

4:3 is underrated. I was watching Star Trek the other day and realized it is easier to focus on a square screen. I wonder if the widescreen era was driven by some technical detail in ease of manufacturing.

AFAIK the "widescreen era" of computer monitors has been driven by TV screens & TV screen marketing (non-tech and non-screen-nerd people just knew "HD" and maybe "1080p" meant "good screen"), which were driven by the desire to watch movies at close to full-frame, which I'd guess were driven by the need/desire to have a wide viewing area for seating-layout reasons. Early cinema, though, often used aspect ratios much closer to 4:3 than later films (they're actually really nice to watch on iPads), so the later, wider format must have evolved for some reason.

I guess it is easier to build cinemas with wide rather then tall screens, since the roof is just so high.

Maybe it is becouse widescreens have more inches diagonaly for the same area as 4:3 that there was a push for consumer TVs with widescreen?

Help fight my ignorance: what makes 16:10 so much better? If you sat me down in front of two different monitors I doubt I could tell the difference.

Vertical screen real estate.

Think about it: when you're writing code or working in a shell or reviewing a configuration file or working on a word document you'll probably use vertical space more than horizontal space.

Consider rotating your monitor to vertical instead. On the desktop, I always have one or both of my monitors vertical.

Can't do that on the laptop!

I'm not so sure, I recently calculated the following:

16:9

16:10

16:10.66 (almost 3:2)

16:12 (4:3)

I'm sure you can tell the difference between 16:12 (old TV) and 16:9 (widescreen).

It's a bigger difference than it sounds, because the space taken by the taskbar and window chrome are fixed. So the extra pixels go directly to your vertical scroll area.

I also like hiding the dock and the menu bar on macos.

On linux I like using a 4k display at 100%. I don't really care about window chrome, icons, etc. I care about text and mainly use a text editor, terminal and browser. They all allow me to set the text size. This way I get the best of both worlds: unobtrusive window chrome and legible text. This works great on a 24" display.

I visited a factory (kind of) a few days ago. I saw an old HP laptop (6xxx model) running Windows XP and controlling some machines. It's as wide as my laptop, the bezel not much larger and the display area definitely bigger because it was almost square. Too bad for the low screen resolution. I'd love that form factor again.