On notebooks I understand the use of widescreens somewhat(But I'm still annoyed that old 15" notebooks had 800px vertical resolution, and new ones have less.

This part rant, part cry for help.

Widescreens are a complete waste to me-an abomination. I do not play many games on my laptop (and those I do play are usually older and do not benefit from a widescreen--if they even support it), and I do not often watch movies. I do not need more space off to the side--I need more space for toolbars, etc. What's more, is that widescreens make laptops more cumbersome to carry around. Yet, from what I can tell, the industry has moved to the widescreen because they have become cheaper, and they sound bigger than they really are. I cannot overstate how much this annoys me.

I'm a longtime Thinkpad fan, as I've had great luck with them. But when I purchased my current laptop (last year, I think), I was horrified to discover that Lenovo had effectively abandoned any non-widescreen display.
So, I purchased a refurbished T61 with a 14.1 4:3 display. The Lenovo T61 doesn't seem to have the durability my IBM T41 had (the screen finally died on me after several years), so I'm worried I'll need to buy a new one.

Anyone know a good laptop manufacturer that still sells a computer with a non-widescreen display?

Btw, external monitors in 4:3 or 5:4 are getting hard and harder to find too.

My 13" MacBook Air has 1440x900. Current Macs all have more than 800 px vertical; maybe with PCs it's different?

I find that people who want 4:3 screens are generally Windows users who are used to making every window fill the screen. Is that your case?

By the way, did it ever occur to you that they may have switched to widescreen because that's what the majority of people actually want?

I want a 60" screen with a retina display like the iPhone 4.

I'm a big fan of wide-screens. I use a 30" at work (2560x1600), and make my desktop even wider with a second screen - an older 20" rotated to portrait mode, for a total desktop area of 3760x1600. It's awesome. I can have multiple terminal windows and a browser window on the main screen, and my e-mail client on the second monitor, and everything I need right in my field of view.

Wide-screens make more efficient use of the field of view of human vision, which is significantly wider than it is tall. It's also much better at scanning horizontally than vertically, so it makes sense to add desktop area horizontally first.

My biggest frustration with widescreens is the apparent desire to replace vertical space with horizontal space. Like the OP, much of my work is with code, or documents, which are all basically more height than width (kinda like books and, you know, letters written and paper, that kind of thing!).

Sure, I could have two windows with 4:3, or, more desirably, 3:4 aspect ratios, but then all the text gets too itsy bitsy for my comfort. I would like more vertical space, and I do know that thisn't a particularly rare position to hold

My biggest frustration with widescreens is the apparent desire to replace vertical space with horizontal space. Like the OP, much of my work is with code, or documents, which are all basically more height than width (kinda like books and, you know, letters written and paper, that kind of thing!).

Sure, I could have two windows with 4:3, or, more desirably, 3:4 aspect ratios, but then all the text gets too itsy bitsy for my comfort. I would like more vertical space, and I do know that thisn't a particularly rare position to hold

[By the way, did it ever occur to you that they may have switched to widescreen because that's what the majority of people actually want?

I work with text, and the biggest advantage for me is having multiple windows horizontally. For example, I have a browser and email window taking up the width of my screen. When I work on text, I have my text editor at 80 character width, which leaves me plenty of room for a preview window (a lot of my writing is in HTML), and a third window, such as for a dictionary or other tool. I have poor eyesight, and use large fonts, and this works fine for me, at least with a 27" monitor. On my laptop it's obviously different, but I don't do much serious work there.

Of course, to each his own.

While our vision is wider than it is tall, as Fwiffo says, that does not mean wider is always better. For code and for documents, the wider lines get, the hard they are to follow. For watching movies and gaming (and I'm sure other applications), I won't deny that widescreen is better. But for the work I do (e.g, drafting/editing documents), widescreens add useless bulk to my laptop.

As for opening multiple windows... I want my laptop to be small. Using multiple windows makes no sense when drafting documents for which attention to detail is important (is that comma italicized? are those straight quotes or curly quotes? is that an en-dash, or em-dash?).

Do you turn e-book readers sideways? If so, you're the first person I've ever heard of doing so.

Actually, LCD manufacturers have found that they can get more screens out of an LCD sheet by making the screens rectangular. There is less waste in the manufacturing process and therefore more profit. It has nothing to do with what the majority wants or what sells best.

Besides, if what was good for the majority was good for everyone, we would all be playing chess. Vive la différence! .