I'm not talking about shitty old laptops. I'm talking about shitty new laptops. There are laptops you can go into an electronics store and buy right now that have 1366x768 displays. And that's ridiculous.

Yes, these laptops are cheaper. But putting a 1080p panel in these laptops wouldn't be that much more expensive. Maybe an extra $0.50 on BOM, compared to the current design. Or, in fact, it might have exactly the same upstream cost. Why, then, use the shittier panel?

The 1366x768 display is purely there for market segmentation. It's an artificial constraint hardware makers impose on their low-spec devices, in order to make them unattractive to people with higher budgets.

A lot of these low-spec devices would be just fine for the small amounts of work many people have to do on computers, and so these people would buy them if they only needed "a little bit of" computer, even if they could afford something more expensive. (Just like you buy a $50 blender, not a $500 blender, if you're only making piña coladas.)

But the people who would consider these low-spec devices (despite having the budget for higher-spec devices as well), are pushed away from the low end, by these artificially-imposed pain points.

And that means that the people who do only have the budget for a low-spec laptop, are getting an artificially-imposed screwing, getting a shittier laptop than their money would buy them in an efficient market, purely because the supplier went to extra design effort to make their low-end products actively repel middle-end customers.

And taken in that lens, the fact that modern OSes don't work well on 1366x768 displays is actually kind of the point. It's not something the OS manufacturer can fix on their end. Because this would be a vicious cycle: if the OS began to work just fine on a 1366x768 display, then the laptop mfgrs would design their next series of low-end laptops to have even smaller displays, in order to re-introduce the market-segmenting "cramped feeling."