16:10 laptops that are 15" and i7?

[sgogeta4]

Dell, HP, and Lenovo have all converted to 16:9 for all their 15" models.

[s-one]

Thanks all, peon01.. good points.

So I really need to think about the gx640.... thinking...

[lackofcheese]

My opinion is quite simply that more pixels is better, whether it's vertical or horizontal.
I think there just isn't enough demand for the higher resolutions, because a lot of people seem to be fine with buying 1366x768. I don't think it's likely that the shift from 16:10 to 16:9 is a manufacturer-only thing; if many consumers really cared, there'd still be lots of room for profit on 16:10.

[peon01]

My opinion is quite simply that more pixels is better, whether it's vertical or horizontal.
I think there just isn't enough demand for the higher resolutions, because a lot of people seem to be fine with buying 1366x768. I don't think it's likely that the shift from 16:10 to 16:9 is a manufacturer-only thing; if many consumers really cared, there'd still be lots of room for profit on 16:10.

Most clients that look at my ThinkPad T60p with 1680 x 1050 say they cannot see a thing. So I think the preference for lower resolution has more to do with human nature than anything else. I would be happy with the same resolution on a newer laptop but at same resolution with 16:9 I would lose vertical real estate which just does not make sense on a new laptop.
And I wish you were right about laptop manufacturers listening to their consumers. If that were the case, business laptops would have never switched from 4:3 to 16:10 and now to 16:9.
However you must have noticed that the switch of laptop format followed the general TV format trend. That is because it is cheaper for screen manufacturers to make one format rather than multiple ones.
There are only a handful of screen manufacturers for most laptops and, if you followed the awful delays that Lenovo, Dell and HP suffered on their high end laptops with FHD screens, you can see how dependent they are on them (I guess one side effect of the integrated supply chain ). People have been waiting for 2 months for their laptop with constant rescheduling of their delivery date (Lenovo eventually took out the FHD option from their website) and I am sure this has done a lot of damage to their reputation and the good will of faithful buyers.

I think the spec decision on a new laptop works in mysterious ways that have not that much to do with consumers’ desires and we are left to find whatever closest matches what we think we want (what we need is a whole different post ).
HP just put out their high end Elitebook 8740W that tops out at $5k-$6k. It has 17" 16:10 Dreamcolor screen, military grade build and all sorts of other good stuff. However you can only have one HDD in that laptop and the only way to get the second one is to replace the DVD with it. I cannot find any business reason for offering just 1 HDD when the competitors (Dell M6500 and W701) offer 3 drives (and Dell even offers RAID 5).


/end of rant

[lackofcheese]

I'm not saying manufacturers listen to the consumers, but they still feel the effects of consumer demand. High enough demand translates into consumers willing to pay a premium for higher-resolution screens, which means more profit on those.

I don't think the cost difference for 16:10 at the screen manufacturers' end is very large at all, perhaps 10% at most. Considering TV screens are much larger with larger pixels, I don't think that following the TV trend is so much about cost-cutting. Plus, a lot of desktop and laptop screens were being made at 16:10 already, and I think the switch from 16:10 to 16:9 would've incurred costs as well. I think it's a lot more of a marketing move, because "Full HD" is probably the easiest way to sell high resolution to the uninformed consumer (and like I said before, 1920x1080 is the cheapest way to get FHD), which leads me to believe that consumers are still at fault here.

Sure, businesses aren't perfect when it comes to exploiting ways to make money, but they're generally pretty good at it. I think the HP Elitebook 8740W at least is an example that manufacturers do have an inkling that some users want 16:10.