I got an email today asking if I knew where to find a 4:3 laptop. I thought it would be easy enough to find, but I quickly remembered seeing that Lenovo cancelled its last 4:3 about a year and a half ago. The only other option after 2007 was a Dell Latitude, and now that’s gone too.

For a lot of professionals, a widescreen just doesn’t make sense. When you spend most of your time working with spreadsheets, text documents, and web browsers, you want a higher resolution with a longer page. Widescreen laptops are actually lower resolution and cheaper to manufacture, so it kind of makes sense for someone like Lenovo or Dell to go this route.

Unfortunately, a lot of business people would still prefer a 4:3 screen. In a few quick searches I found hundreds of pages of results dedicated to finding 4:3 laptops, rebuilding exisiting 4:3 laptops, and discussing the lack of 4:3 laptops. From digging through a few of the posts, it seems a big part of the disappearance is consumer ignorance. Manufacturers have actually convinced the world that widescreen is better. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the malinformed: “widescreen is better for reading text because your eyes are side by side not up and down so its easier to read left to right.” Yes, someone actually wrote that.

I hate to call netbooks a section of the PC market. They’re just laptops. Small laptops. That’s all. The world’s great surprise at the success of the netbook makes as little sense to me as defining these little laptops as their own section of the market does. We’re in a recession and the machines are cheap. It’s also not a secret that computers usually deliver more than most consumers ever need. Smaller, less-powerful laptops are a welcome deviation from that course. So why is Michael Dell bashing the tiny PCs?

Speaking at a dinner party in Silicon Valley last night, Dell said user excitement with netbooks lasts all of 36 hours. Dell says users long for their larger screens, their bigger keyboards, shortly after the netbook thrill passes. “We see a fair amount of customers not really being that satisfied with the smaller screen and the lower performance, unless it’s like a secondary machine or it’s (a) very first machine and the expectations are low,” said Dell. “But as a replacement machine for an experienced user, it’s not what we’d recommend. It’s not a good experience, and we don’t see users very happy with those.”

It’s a strange sentiment from the CEO of a company that has a full line of netbooks for sale. Apparently this was Dell’s way of saying his company can give a customer options, that it can meet any need. As Don Reisinger at CNet pointed out, netbook sales have gone up 264% in Q2 over last year, while notebook sales dropped 14%. Mr. Dell would likely do well to consider those numbers when making sweeping statements about the future of the computer market.