So, the missus is wanting a new laptop - which suits me as her existing one only has 2GB of RAM, has a German version of Windows 7 on it, and a German keyboard (with the "Y" and "Z" swapped over). She's wanting it mainly for work, not for movies or anything like that.
So, not a problem I thinks! Should be fairly straight-forward to find a £500-£700 or so laptop with a 15" 16:10 matte screen, an average CPU, 4GB of RAM and a capapble battery.
Wrong.
Seems that since I was last in the laptop market, all the manufacturers have decided that people exclusively use their laptops for watching films and playing games and that nobody ever wants to do productive things. As a result, NONE of the main manufacturers make a single 16:10 laptop any more. Not one. Even the Dell Precision laptops, Lenovo Thinkpads and the other more business oriented ones all have shite multi-media oriented 16:9 screens. As a result, her creaking, 3-year-old Lenovo actually has a better screen than almost anything I could find today.
Well, with one exception. Seems there is one company that still produces 16:10 laptops, but that company is Apple, and the MacBook Pros start at around £1,500 for the 15" ones.
So great. I've either got to pay £1,500+ for a MacBook, or I've got to buy her a new laptop with a worse screen than her old one. Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer: You're all a bunch of stupid, cheapskate fuckers :-(
16:10 is better for gaming.
In fact 16:10 is just better. It is a closer fit to my (and most other humans') field of vision. Films tend to be wider than either so you get letterboxing either way.
But yeah, I don't see it as a big deal. 16:9 is only marginally inferior, you'll get used to it.
It bothers me a bit. 16:10 is just /nicer/ (better approximation of the golden ratio) and it's frustrating that these things are being dictated by the entertainment industry when most of us spend most of our time on our computers doing things other than consuming TV/films. Man, that was a badly written sentence.
But yeah, I managed with 4:3 for years and either is better than that so it's no big deal.