Professionals need our 4:3 screens

It does exist-- from hobbyist entrepreneurs. 51nb has been selling motherboard upgrades for the old 4:3 ThinkPad models for a few years now, and others have begun to specialize in whole-system integration, additional mods, and complete systems based on this work (I'm one of those people, though I also do it as a hobby).

My three ThinkPads X60s machines are all Broadwells, with nice 12.1" 4:3 high res screens using modern backlights I fabricate myself. They work so well I intend to build more.

There's only so much you can get with good tiling. I used to not care about the aspect ratio debate until I started increasing font sizes in my applications. My eyesight is still good, but being able to work farther from the screen feels better, and I can keep brightness low.

I work on a 16:9 27" display where this is moot (still, I feel like I use the center 50% of the display 90% of the time) but I feel this pain in laptops.

At 16:9, for page-based content (all text editors and code tools, productivity tools, web browsers; terminals less so), you're forced to display two pages side by side. Still, they're shorter vertically than your eye can handle. Horizontally, your eye will either gravitate towards the center of the display, or have to switch between the two sides (ultimately rendering the extra area of the display temporarily useless)

At 4:3 in full screen (especially important for smaller displays) you can have a sidebar or ancillary tool occupying 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen, and the paged content occupying the rest.

I've made my peace with 16:10.

For most forms of computer work, he has a point. 16:9 at 27" isn't the same thing as 16:9 at 15.6".

Browsers, word processors, CLIs, etc. run top-to-bottom, and can make you feel claustrophobic on the tiny 16:9 screens most laptops have.

Not if you're only working on one document at a time. Being distracted by some other stuff on the side is not always a benefit and many editors are surprisingly hard to set up to center documents on the screen while blending out anything on the sides.

Where does the author imply that a majority of programmers prefer 4:3? The expressions he uses are "many of my colleagues", and "only a part of [academics and IT professionals, but] still a large group". I think they are accurate.

I do strongly prefer 4:3. As an academic, a large portion of my time is spent reading papers in PDF, and opening papers side by side is mostly useless - you want to read, not compare or copy from one to the other. When coding, it depends on how your mind works. I understand that many people may want to have several files on screen at the same time, but my mind works mostly by focusing on a single file at a time, and rapidly switching context to another. Having several windows visible at the same time distracts me.

All the author (and other people wanting 4:3, like myself) are saying is that we want to have 4:3 as an alternative. We do not want to force 4:3 on anyone, just to be able to buy laptops with 4:3 screen, even if they are a minority of the product range. Is that that much to ask? Would it be that bad for people who prefer 16:9 to have 90% of laptop screens designed for them, instead of 100%? Because as long as you are OK with that and you don't need 100% of the screens to cater to your preference, I don't see why posts like this should create any controversy at all.