He says that the resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, that even a $399 tablet has, is appropriate gear, even for a diagonal of 11". He said “Please. Stop with the ‘retina’ crap, just call it ‘reasonable resolution’. The fact that laptops stagnated ten years ago (and even regressed, in many cases) at around half that in both directions is just sad.”. He also stated that he is mad about tech-journalists who do not realize that a high resolution does not necessarily mean small fonts, but the extra pixels can be used for more severe letters of the same size. It could also help people with damaged vision.
Considering the flood of tablets and smartphones with high pixel density display, especially if we take into account that the majority of them have a high-quality IPS or AMOLED matrix, it is difficult not to agree with Torvalds view of the situation. It really is ridiculous that with every new generation of smartphones/tablets you get even higher resolution, there are already some of the Ultra HD resolution smartphones announced, but notebooks still stay at 1366x768. Is this a sign that manufacturers don’t care much about notebooks and think that tablets and smartphones will replace them completely?
[Ed – we have asked a few laptop makers and none of them had decent answers. A few years ago there were more than a few laptops with 1920x1080 native resolution, but all of that changed despite having more powerful mobile GPUs. We have even found that 17-inch laptops were hobbled at 1400x900 which is a ridiculous resolution for a 17-inch display. You can still get displays with this resolution, but you are going to be paying for a high-end gaming laptop to get it. For some reason manufacturers are making normal laptops less useful and putting more effort into lower powered tablets and ultrabooks in an attempt to swing the market in that direction all by crippling a platform that they know is more flexible and potentially more powerful just to sell a few more Ultrabooks… ]
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