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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Better yet, why don't they go back and grab the 2006 17" form factor?

That was the best developer laptop I had. The missing 2" on the 15" just makes the IDE too narrow.

I keep wanting to buy a 17" and then walking back from it after seeing/handling 17" laptops in physical stores.

All the bezel-shrinking R&D being done for phones has to reach laptops at some point. I'm seriously losing half an inch of luggable-but-not-lookable space on each side of the screen, plus a good inch below. (I have like the most common 13" Dell in the world; just walking around in the study room of the library I see three more.)

The HP Spectre x360 is a good example of bezel-shrinking in laptops. I have a 13" model and it's nice to have a more compact laptop.

I have no idea why this style isn't more popular. Maybe it seems too fragile to consumers?

It is extremely popular, in the PC market and to some extent in the Mac market as well. The MacBook Pro 2016 had smaller bezels than the 2015.

Dell XPS 13

The Apple 17" laptops were about the same size (maybe even smaller) as large 15" laptops though. Presumably, an Apple 17" laptop in this day and age would be pretty manageable size-wise.

I can definitely attest to this, having had one back in the day. Of course back then, everyone else made super-chunky laptops, at least with the cheaper models (so chunky that people bought netbooks because laptops were insufficiently portable.)

I frequently put Apple's 17" laptop in a backpack/case slot designed for 15" normal laptops, and it fit just fine.

The 2006 17" MacBook Pro only had a resolution of only 1680x1050. A 15" Retina MacBook Pro has a "true" resolution of 2880x1800 but is normally used at an effective resolution of 1440x900. However, you can easily adjust it to be an effective resolution of 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 (the resolution of the last 17" MacBook Pro in 2011).

Of course the effective pixels per inch may make some features too small but the effective PPI of 1680x1050 on a current 15" MacBook Pro is lower than the actual PPI of the last 17" MacBook Pro's screen:

147 PPI 15.4" 1920x1200 133 PPI 17" 1920x1200 129 PPI 15.4" 1680x1050 116 PPI 17" 1680x1050 110 PPI 15.4" 144x900

My favorite was the first Aluminum Powerbook 12 and 17. I wamted both. I owned the 17 inch. I envied the 12 inch also. The 17 inch was almost the size of a Dell 15 inch at the time, so it wasn't as large it seemed. It was and is my favorite laptop I owned, ever. Well, that or my IBM Thinkpad 600e.

I wouldn't mind that either, but OTOH, I don't work on a laptop screen all day as a rule. I'd rather have a compact machine that I can just plug into a screen. I wouldn't mind a Mac Mini style machine with magsafe power and/or an easily detachable docking station.

Without a battery, you'd have to shut down each time you moved from seat to seat. You might as well carry a fast, bootable drive around and treat the actual computer at each seat as the docking station.

That was back in the day when you had to buy Apple's 17" model just to get the same number of pixels on your screen as everyone else's 15" model. Apple had worse density than the competition back then.

Then a few years passed, and Apple went all-in on high-DPI "Retina" displays, while the whole PC laptop world had a great display regression.

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