It feels like those cursed 1366x768 panels will still be hanging around somewhere or another forever.

It costs much more to make bigger high resolution screens with good yields.

Perhaps because people realized that the pixel inflation is at some point counterproductive. If you can't distinguish pixels, what difference does it make?

What was the laptop?

I mean, yeah that resolution is ridiculous, but anything above 1080p on a screen less than ~14 inches is going to have diminishing returns and most of those returns will be in how "pretty" it is, not how useful it is.

Looking for a laptop for my Dad more recently (early 2023) there were no models with less than 1080 that were not also incredibly crumby in other respects (dog slow eMMC drives, too little RAM to run current Windows well especially once it swaps to that slow drive, awful looking keyboards, etc.). We checked for lower resolution screens because with his eyes higher is pretty pointless (and it might have reduced the price) but went with 1080 and set it to be scaled in the OS.

> In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display

You can buy a full laptop fur a fair amount less than many phones with high-resolution screens though, possibly more so back then. What spec was his machine beyond the screen? Also: most people are closer to their phone screen in use than they are a laptop, perhaps making the case for higher resolutions there stronger.

Reliably producing those 720/768 displays at common laptop & tablet sizes was cheap so making laptops/tablets around them was cheap, and more than enough people thought it good enough (or didn't know better). Given our experience above, the economies of scale on 1080+ panels have changed such that the 1080 screens are in the sweet zone.

The fact that $1,000+ 15-17in 1080p laptops are still being sold today is just atrocious.

Fractional scaling works well on Plasma under Wayland if you're using an up to date distribution.

No. It really isn't. I can tap a keyboard shortcut and change my desktop resolution in .1 increments and everything just works and scales up and down. I've run my internal laptop display at 1.7 for 3+ years. (Sway)