4:3 is not a fad, it's superior but lost out due to manufacturers consolidating tv displays with monitors.

I guess they would like you to think it's bad since they don't make them for cost savings reasons. I'd buy 4:3. There are still a few niche makers for medical and industrial purposes but the specs are crummy and prices high relative to mainstream displays.

I'd love to have a 4:3 laptop again. Best general use display. I find it amazing how we have been forced to use widescreens for so long yet our content, except for movies, still doesn't fit it. Office documents can fit on screen. Websites have to pad endless whitespace on the sides. The list goes on. We need to return to 4:3.

It is my belief that wider aspect ratio displays are easier to manufacture, too.

At a given pixel-pitch, you need fewer rows. In extremis, imagine a display that is N x 1 -- much easier to limit defects and handle the necessary multiplexing.

Back when 16:10 and 16:9 displays became common, I remember they weren't received particularly fondly by many of the developers I knew. Non-technical people seemed to like them more. More hardcore developers rather had to somewhat begrudgingly accept them.

Maybe the 3:2 aficionados aren't the same people who started disliking 4:3 displays when widescreen became popular?

I think people realized that the media-centric 16:9 doesn’t handle the piles of horizontal bars (titlebars, toolbars, tab bars, status bars, taskbars, etc) that compose modern desktop UIs all that well, particularly at traditional laptop resolutions (1920x1080 and its 2x counterparts and below).

Personally I don’t need a ton of width, the most I have side by side on a laptop screen are two code panes in an IDE. If I need any more than that I’m docked at a desk with dual 27” monitors. I would say my sweet spot is 16:10, but I’ve not tried a 5:4 or 3:2 laptop and have never used a 4:3 laptop for dev work, so I don’t know if I’d find those more suitable or not.

My guess is this this is a resolution issue. When the resolution was low, moving to 16:9 or 16:10 allowed you to have two side-by-side windows open. Now that the pixel density is higher you can make it 3:2, have two windows side by side even more comfortably, and get your vertical space back as well.

That said, you do sort of need 16 inches. Otherwise things start to get too tiny and you'll want to do scaling (which defeats the point..)

The Matebook 16 for me seems to hit the sweetspot in terms of pixel density and I don't feel the need to scale anything (the DPI is similar to my 1080p 13inch). So I'm actually glad it's not 4K