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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

You're making me miss my Thinkpad T60p. Compared to my new W500, it wasn't especially fast, ran annoyingly hot and didn't waste any time burning through its extra-capacity battery. The screen was vastly better though: IPS with a 1600x1200 resolution.

I don't actually need color accuracy, but I find myself slightly shocked by how bad other laptops look after getting used to the T60p. Laptop manufacturers: I'd pay extra for IPS (don't invent your own cute name for it or I won't know you have it) and I'd pay extra for high-res 4:3.

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> I'd pay extra for high-res 4:3

I suspect they know this, and simply shifted the market to 16:9 so they could later charge a premium for what used to be the standard.

Matt Kohut from Lenovo blames LCD makers. He says they make much more profit selling panels for TVs than for laptops, so they standardized on HDTV aspect ratios and won't supply affordable 4:3 panels:

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=220

(I have no idea how accurate this is, but other computer makers have given similar explanations.)

I'd believe that if anyone was actually selling 4:3 laptops at a premium.

That wouldn't have happened yet. In my head, I have a loose projection of when I figure it would, it's something like 2013-2015

In any case, I'm not saying it's fact, just loose speculation

I don't think waiting until people decide they can tolerate 16:10 or 16:9 would be a good strategy. Thinkpads were some of the last laptops to offer 4:3 models, and people were buying them for that reason. They already have premium prices and a reputation for quality; I think if anybody was going to do this, Lenovo would already be doing it.

These are people who don't understand that marketing is important, despite the obvious example of Apple who seem to not only survive, but thrive almost purely on marketing...

I suspect the truth is more likely that 16:9/10 is so much more popular that its no longer economical to produce 4:3 laptops.

I prop mine up with a fan underneath the CPU all day long.

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