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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

I'm so damn happy people are starting to realize how awesome resolution is. I've been buying 1920x1200 15" Dell laptops for 10 years now, and never bought a Mac because they've always had terrible resolution. I run Linux anyway, but I'm going buy Mac hardware next, unless a PC maker creates a competitive display (which I assume they will).

Next up: IPS LCDs everywhere.

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For years, the things I have cared about in terms of computing have been, roughly:

1) Internet connectivity. Without it I'm mostly dead in the water.

2) Screen resolution. I want as much code/information on the screen as possible. I currently have a 1920x1200 Dell myself, and am I bit scared/saddened that I won't be able to replace it.

3) Memory. Always good.

After that come processor speed and storage space. I suspect my next machine will have SSD, because I've heard that it's such a dramatic improvement.

I completely agree with Linus though - I very much want a high resolution laptop screen.

Once you've gone SSD you'll be amazed you got by without it. It's the biggest single-part speed upgrade I've seen since the 90s. Even just a small on for a system partition, and data kept on a traditional HDD, you'll see great gains.

(And yes, also agree, it's a shame that monitor and laptop resolution seemed to stall at 'HD' for ages)

Any laptop I buy for any one, I always replace it with SSD. Higher dpi doesnot matter much for a programer but higher screen estate or resolution matters more.

After having bought an SSD a couple of years ago I can honestly say it is at the top of my requirement list (after internet connectivity, but it's basically impossible to buy a computer that can't connect to the internet) for all my computers, easily above memory and screen resolution.

SSD on my MacBook Air is the one thing that has made more of a difference than anything else.

I can live with only running four or five major apps at a time in the 4 Gigabytes that came with my 2010 MacBook Air - but the SSD changed my life. I'd put that on your list above memory.

Obviously if you're working with massive datasets or many many VM's this may not be true, but everyone I know who has 16GB RAM has claimed that it's more than enough. I've got 8GB, and haven't any complaints. I even know people with 32GB who say that with hindsight they'd have been perfectly happy with only 16GB.

An SSD however, is incredible. I originally wrote "essential", though I guess it's not... but it certainly feels like it is once you have one. The downside is that it will make working with non-SSD desktop machines irritating-as-hell.

Hell, I had 2 GB RAM before and it seemed ok, 8 GB now is more than I need. I had to send the SSD for replacement, though, and it was easily the most frustrating week in recent memory.

RAM is so cheap today, I just maxed it out on my laptop. Granted, I have seen only probably 22GB out of 32GB used when I had YACY (P2P search network written in Java) running, but I still expect having system use rest of RAM for caches which in theory should speedup access to file system (on my SSD drive)

Memory deduplication in Windows 8 [1] will lower RAM usage for VMs further.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/better...

FWIW Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) has a maximum memory limit of 16 GB.

Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate can go up to 192 GB. Windows 8 is limited to 128 GB, but the Professional and Enterprise editions can do 512 GB.

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...

One of the reasons that I finally jumped over to the Mac was the fact that it was one of the few laptops that provided 1680x1050 at around 15".

My previous 2 Windows laptops had been that resolution, but when I came to upgrade about 2 or 3 years ago, that resolution seemed to have been abandoned for 15" laptops by pretty much everyone apart from Apple. Most of them had gone to 1440 or even less. A handful of pretty expensive, at least Apple price, and usually quite bulky, ones offered 1920x1200 but given that the scaling didn't look too great on them at the time I though that this might be just a bit too small for me, and if I was going to be paying about the same price for a Windows PC as I was paying for a Mac one - and not get the resolution I wanted anyway on Windows, I thought I'd bite the bullet and see what all of the Mac fuss was about.

I am a little surprised by this - both Sony and Dell have had credible 1920x1080 options at 15" for several years (admittedly I prefer x1200, which has also been available) - both have also had 1920 13" options for at least a year.

Are these matte? Put one next to a glossy display and the difference is glaringly obvious (pun intended!).

Yes, matte! (well, at least on the ones I know about - my Sony is matte - Glossy is better for little more than the store)

Like I say, the 1920 seemed too small to me, given the not particularly great scaling in Windows at the time if I did want to use other resolutions, and the ones that I did find were usually around Apple prices anyway.

I was recently asked for laptop buying advice. I told them that if they're going to be using it more than casually, then prioritise the screen over everything else; Minimum 1080p IPS screen. I was shocked that here were less than a 5 models (that you can buy new) out there that fit the bill. Such a sad state, I expected that to be the starting off point.

1680 by 1050, which is the best you could get on a 15" Mac previously, isn't exactly "terrible resolution" (by historical standards anyway). But otherwise agreed. My main machine is a 15" Retina, and I don't think I could ever go back to a lower-PPI laptop.

I bought the first generation MacBook Pro, a 17", for that reason. Other resolutions were just too small for what I was doing, and 1680 seemed like just enough. Eventually when they started offering the resolution upgrades on 15" models I upgraded to my current machine. The way I see it, there's no way I can be disappointed by the resolution of my next machine. No more pains over spending $100-300 for just a small bump to make things usable. Of course, the downside is that I can't let myself even try out the retina MacBook in store for fear that I won't look back– I'll wait until I can afford it.

Last time I went shopping for a machine 1680x1050 was my target resolution for a 17" screen with dual hard drives, I'm still using it four years later (it has had HD upgrade to 2x500gb 7200RPM drives) It happens to have a couple of GeForce 8600M GPUs in there so its just about usable for gaming too.

After I dropped it (laptop bag strap broke) and smashed the corner I looked around for a replacement (The mac book pro was tempting but oh the $$$) and couldn't find one for sensible money. So I bought some new plastics, redid the thermal paste on the CPU (it had started thermal throttling during long compiles) bought a second hand screen (and a new 4 port USB pcb that got damaged during the fall) off ebay to replace the broken clips that hold it together when its closed. So I also have a spare screen now.

I'm dreading replacing it but I reckon I'm probably still good for a year or two yet.

I would consider the fact that they have only been able to increase the vertical resolution by ~300 pixels in 20 years to be pretty terrible.

Meanwhile the images we view on those same screens have increased in size by nearly 20 times!

20 years ago notebooks had 640x400 or 640x480 screens...

If you include the 15" retina MBP then that's 17x more pixels in 20 years. And that includes greyscale to 8bit color to 16 bit color to 24/32 bit color, passive-matrix to active-matrix, and dozens of other panel technology improvements not directly related to resolution.

The XGA (1024x768) was intro'd in the early 90s. Maybe you missed the earlier discussion but we've all been lamenting the crappy default resolutions since then. We were not discussing bit depth or black and white vs. color.

Not in laptops. Which is what everyone is talking about, if you missed it.

The problem is there are just as many bad IPS LCDs systems out there as there are bad TN LCDs. The main problem seems to be either uneven backlighthing (especially on LED based LCDs) and really bad anti-glare coatings that make grey colors sparkle. I just returned an Asus IPS LCD because of the later case.

There's also the problematic panel used in the Sony S15 and others, which is 15" 1900x1080 IPS but has poor colour accuracy that makes reds look orange.

can i have a link to your 10 year old 1920x1200 15" laptop? i'd buy one just for the screen to use in one of the many hacky projects!

Older thinkpads had these as an option http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and-parts/detail.pag... It's not 10 years but they are pretty cheap now anyways (although getting your hands on the WUXGA or even WSXGA+ isn't the easiest task)

Good old 1600x1200, here it goes:

http://www.laptopmax.com/HP/reviews/34/HP_Compaq_NC8000_revi...

Ohh, I have exactly this one unusable because of a dead motherboard at home.

Dell has had a number of them over the years, one I remember was the Latitude D820 (15.4", with a 1920x1200 option) back in 2006 but I know they had such offers before as a colleague had one in 2005.

I'm not sure they offer WXUGA screens anymore though, it seems everyone has nerfed back to "full HD" (which offers 120 vertical pixels less) these days, which is bullshit. Since 2010 (when this trend started), the interwebs have been full of people trying to find out manufacturers who still provided WXUGA screens.

>> Since 2010 (when this trend started), the interwebs have been full of people trying to find out manufacturers who still provided WXUGA screens.

Exactly, it's like laptop vertical resolution in particular has gone in the wrong direction the past couple of years. What happened? Trying to view web sites on one of these resolution challenged laptops means a lot of scrolling up and down, feels like the 90s all over again. Glad I'm not the only one and glad Linux raised the issue.

> Exactly, it's like laptop vertical resolution in particular has gone in the wrong direction the past couple of years.

Indeed it has, formerly 1920x1200 screens were dialed back to HD at best (so 120 vertical pixels lost), and where the standard laptop resolution used to be WXGA (1280x800), WSXGA (1440x900) and WSXGA+ (1680x1050), all of that has been rolled back to the completely crazy 1366x768 garbage. TV's "HD" has been a blasted plague on computer displays.

Agreed. Trying to find a decent high-resolution screen is a real pain today. Dial back 5 years, and it wasn't such an issue! Everyone makes "HD" up until 24"... 24" HD is nasty.

I would hope for something approaching 3000 x 1500 in a 24" screen :-(

I have the D830 with the WXUGA screen and even though it's an old 1.8Ghz Core2Duo, I still refuse to buy a new laptop because I can't find anything with a 16:10 ratio, everything is 16:9 and it's difficult to find even 1920x1080 screens at a reasonable price.

You mean WUXGA. I also detest the shrinking of vertical pixels and the manufacturers pushing it on to consumers. Even on desktops, the prices for non widescreens (more vertical space) seem to be priced excessively to drive people to get widescreens.

I got Dell C810 with 1600x1200 screen around 2003. There is a couple of them still available on ebay

The 14.1 inch Thinkpad T21 released in 2000 had a resolution of 1400x1050. Not as good as you were asking, but an awful lot better than nearly all 14 inch laptops you've been able to get for the last 5 years.

I got a Dell Inspiron 8200 with 1,600 x 1,200 in 2002

My Toshiba Portege ultralight back around 2001 had 1920x1200 on a screen about 12". After that I got 15.6" wuxga Dell Latitudes and now a Thinkpad W500 from a Lenovo outlet because their current offerings dropped down to short-screen rez.

One of the deciding factors for purchasing my Elitebook 8560w was the 1920x1080 RGB LED screen.

I can never go back.

Check out the Asus Zenbook Prime series. They are 11" or 13" laptops with 1920x1080 IPS displays. I have one and it works well with Ubuntu. http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/ASUS_ZENBOOK...

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