Cyber Oppression

Why, oh why, are laptop manufacturers making their products worse and worse? I’m talking about screens here — two of the major changes in the past few years to laptop screens are both simply awful:

• Glossy screens. If you wanted a mirror, you would buy a mirror, not a laptop. These make the screen VERY hard to read because you’re staring at a reflection of your own face (and the room behind you). I have read some other people who agree with this; their general idea was that glossy screens look shiny and new when someone goes to Best Buy and looks over all the laptops on display. I actually returned one notebook because had a glossy screen; as far as I’m concerned, a glossy screen makes a notebook essentially unusable.
• Widescreen aspect ratio. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of the documents I read (or work on) are not very wide — they are TALL. That’s why mice have up-down scrollwheels and not left-right scrollwheels — because most of the time documents are _vertically_ too large for the screen they are on, not _horizontally_. The only legitimate reason to use a widescreen aspect ratio is for watching widescreen movies — I don’t watch movies on my laptop. If anything, I would like to buy a tallscreen notebook so that I can spend less time scrolling. Widescreen aspect ratios also cause a lot of problems including:
  • Looking horribly stretched and blurred whenever something (a movie, a game, etc) needs a normal 4:3 aspect ratio.
  • Incompatibilities with virtual machine software
  • Incompatibilities with different operating systems
  • Incompatibilities or just plain ugliness when using Remote Desktop or similar between widescreen and non-widescreen PCs