![]() Your laptop's screen is its most important feature.Let's say we want to compare two smartphones: The Apple iPhone X with a 5.85-inch display, and the iPhone 8 Plus, which has a 5.5-inch screen. If you have to pay a little extra or skimp on other components to get 1080p, you have to do it. Next time you're shopping for a laptop, getting one with 1920 x 1080 pixels or higher should be at or near the top of your list of priorities. Just as we expect our laptops to have modern Wi-Fi, we should demand that they have high- resolution screens. If Dell or Lenovo tried to sell an Ethernet-only laptop today, it probably wouldn't sell a single unit. Now, you can't find a new system with worse than an 802.11n radio and most support the latest 802.11ac standard. What You Can DoĪt one point in PC history, you had to pay extra to get a laptop with Wi-Fi. HP's Chromebook 14 is also available with a full HD screen. In the world of Chromebooks, Acer's Chromebook 14 gives you a 1080p display for $299. For $399, the Asus VivoBook E403NA has a sleek aluminum chassis, a great selection of ports and a sharp, 13-inch full HD screen. The Acer E 15 (E5-575-33BM) also has a 1920 x 1080 panel, along with a Core i3 CPU and a 1TB hard drive. Acer's Spin 1 convertible costs just $329 and has a gorgeous, 1080p screen that can reproduce an impressive 129 percent of the color gamut. ![]() Though 1080p resolution laptops are still way overpriced as a group, you can find a few at budget prices if you look hard enough. In 2017, the average selling price of a Windows laptop with a less-than-1080p display was $323 while the typical 1080p laptop cost a full $795. More importantly, the price of laptops with 1080p displays tends to be much higher, though that may be an indication that those systems also have better processors, RAM and storage drives. We have no idea what the cost difference is between a 1366 panel and 1080p one, but when you're making thousands of PCs, even a $10 difference in the BOM (Bill of Materials) cost adds up. "They often have to make the choice as to what the consumer would want (or the business) and a down-res screen is an easier sell (and takes out more costs to hit a pricepoint) than a shift in processor, or RAM, or sometimes even weight or thickness," Baker told me. NPD Analyst Stephen Baker says that 1366 x 768 displays are so common, because manufacturers want to save money. In 2015, 78 percent of business systems had low-res screens so that number dropped by 27 percent in just two years. A full 80 percent of Chromebooks sold in 20 x 768 displays.īelieve it or not, even though two-thirds of consumer laptops still have crappy screens, that percentage has dropped from 72 percent in 2016 and 84 percent in 2015. In 2017, 66 percent of all consumer notebooks had low-res screens while 51-percent of business systems were less than full HD. According to NPD, in 2012, 82 percent of all laptops sold had low-res displays. Slow Progressīack in 2012, I wrote a column entitled "Note to Notebook Makers: 1366 is a joke," and sadly, today, we're still hearing the same stale punchline. Only when you can compose an email in one window while looking at Web page in the other can you truly multitask. However, with 1920 pixels, you have just enough space to stack two windows side-by-side (2048 or 2560 would be even better). With only 1366 pixels of space, you can't fit two full-size applications on the screen at once, without scrolling horizontally or having them overlap each other. Most applications and Web pages need around 1,000 pixels of horizontal space to show their content. So, if you're going to get a laptop with a low-res screen, you better start practicing your two-finger swipes. Looking at the New York Times home page at both resolutions, the 1920 x 1080 screen has 10 more lines of text on it. ![]() On some online articles, you can't even see past the headline on a low-res screen. Even worse, a 1366 x 768 display doesn't provide enough screen real estate for reading Web pages, editing documents or multitasking. ![]()
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