Agreed about the "HD craze", especially because of the following facts:
- "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on a PC". It makes explaining to family members which monitor is right for them very hard, because of course "HD" must be a good thing, right?
- Most entry level laptops come with said resolution (this may be starting to change in the past few years).
- Businesses, even software development companies, have a hard time understanding that higher resolution monitors are not for gaming or watching movies, but for actual work. In fact, they are more useful for working, because for watching movies a standard "HD" monitor is enough.
> "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on a PC".
Unmodified HD (without “full”) generally means 720p for other screens, that's not a “laptop screen” specific quirk. (Well, I guess it is, in that 720p is 1280×720, but you aren't complaining that 1366×768 is a higher resolution than it should be for the bare “HD” label.)
(Also, 1366x768 is not “unusable”, and I say that as someone who was habituated to a 1600×1200 desktop display for years before starting to use 1366×768 laptops a lot in parallel with it.)
You're right, unmodified HD is 720p for all screens (you have to admit it's funny "HD" means "low res"). It's just that I first encountered this annoying resolution in entry-level laptops. Even more irritating, if you wanted higher res you had to buy a "gaming" laptop, which is ridiculous since for gaming a 720p screen is more than enough.
I'm glad you don't consider it unusable for work, but you're in the minority[1]. The resolution sucks and there's no excuse for it. You can barely work with an IDE and it forces you to use an external monitor -- and I say this as someone who finds the Jeff Atwood "I can't work without 3 external monitors" kind of snobbery irritating.
[1] Likewise, there always used to be someone who didn't mind flickery low refresh rates in CRT monitors. Their opinion can be ignored since pretty much everyone else cares, even when they don't know what's happening and they just know their eyes and head hurt after a while.
There should be a special place in hell reserved for companies who still produce that garbage. This resolution was already too low 10 years but nowadays is not not usable at all.
IMO the problem is not the resolution itself, but the fact that it is the same for all screen sizes. 1366x768 is too high for an 11" screen but too low for a 15" one; 16x9 ratiio also is bad. The only company that understands it right is Apple: the DPI is about same across all of the non-Retina laptops, yet the resolution varies.
- "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on a PC". It makes explaining to family members which monitor is right for them very hard, because of course "HD" must be a good thing, right?
- Most entry level laptops come with said resolution (this may be starting to change in the past few years).
- Businesses, even software development companies, have a hard time understanding that higher resolution monitors are not for gaming or watching movies, but for actual work. In fact, they are more useful for working, because for watching movies a standard "HD" monitor is enough.