Do that many people buy these laptops as portable Netflix players?
Until 4k became more popular maybe five years ago, the vast majority of devices were 1920x1080, plus a series of budget 1366x768 devices but that's the same ratio. Upscaling an integer factor to 4k is also convenient and doesn't cause any issues, just makes everything sharper.
It's when you start to mess with the ratio that you need to suddenly account for different people having different things in view. You can't simply scale a hero image (or game scene or so) to 20:9 without everything becoming contorted, you need to start to crop, but then you're hiding information so now you need to add optional parts that don't look out of place when shown and can also be hidden without consequence.
Eh? 16:10 is a pretty standard ratio; all Apple laptops have used it since about 2007, for instance (until very recently, when they've gone a little taller) but also many other vendors (usually on the high end; for whatever reason manufacturers do tend to treat taller than 16:9 as a bit of a premium option). It was also effectively the standard ratio for widescreen desktop monitors for most of the noughties.
16:9 on a small laptop screen really is _very_ tight; honestly I kind of miss 4:3 laptop screens but that ship has definitively sailed.
Is your concern about video? Watching TV is probably not most peoples' major use of laptops, and in any case a lot of content is made at ratios _wider_ than 16:9 these days.
At 10% of the market, I'd not say that's standard.
I think it's pretty great because it means less scrolling. I would really prefer to see 4:3 again.
The only thing that comes to mind is killing time by watching videos on social networks sites.
I split Vim side-by-side.
I use Tree Style Tab in Firefox and hide the horizontal tab bar. (If I’m tiling a browser beside something else, I close the tab sidebar most of the time.)
16:9 is fine, so long as you’re set up to be able to use that width.
On my 13.5″ Surface Book, I appreciated its 3:2 aspect ratio, because it was already too narrow to comfortably tile things horizontally anyway, so why not go even more in the tall direction?
On my current 15.6″ 16:9 laptop, I tile and split frequently because it’s comfortable. 16:10 would still be fine, but I do this enough that I believe I’d honestly very slightly prefer 16:9 for its extra centimetre of width (~5 columns in my terminal), even at the cost of 1.5cm of height (~2 rows).
There are advantages and disadvantages to the different ratios in different scenarios.
(Still, I do think that most people would find 16:10 a happier medium at this size. But me, I can effectively use 16:9, though I don’t think I’d want to go any wider.)
Is it? Gee, I wonder why it's the only screen ratio I've seen people use since we moved away from CRT screens until a few years ago when 4k and friends became popular and there was suddenly no standard resolution to expect anymore. Curious that we're all using this inferior ratio for literally all those things all the time.
