Cheap 2006 laptop? Would have been 768p at best, maybe even 600p. Even Apple would happily sell you an 800p macbook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2006%E2%80%932012)) until 2012 and laptop GPUs of the era would struggle with a 1080p desktop.

There were a lot of higher res laptops in that time period. They weren't everywhere which is why most people don't know about them.

They weren't "cheap college laptops" though.

Here's a 2006 laptop review roundup: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/best-laptops-of-2006/

There's a 4:3 1680x1050 laptop there (a $2k machine, described as "doesn't come cheap") and the macbook pro (also starting at $2k) was 1440x900.

Some people don't care as much about DPI.

I personally got the third-cheapest 49" ultrawide.

People's eyesights vary. I need big letters anyways.

The point of HiDPI is not having really small text, is doubling the scaling so text looks smooth instead of a pixelated, blocky mess.

I thought it was a gimmick in 2015 before I got my first MBP, these days I can't go back and have my eyes bleed on 96 dpi. You don't even need full Retina, my 27" 4K screen looks gorgeous at double scaling.

>150 dpi monitors are the second best tech upgrade of this millennium after the SSD. Yet, there's still people these days that will try to convince you their 5400 rpm disk is fast enough, just because they have never experienced modern hardware.

Resolution doesn’t change physical text size. They’re independent. It makes text at the same physical size more readable. Which sounds like what you want?

> I personally got the third-cheapest 49" ultrawide.

I'm shopping for ultawide right now, care to share the link of the monitor you got?