I have a 13" Macbook Air with a reasonable 1440x900 resolution, and I can fit about 1 1/3 windows on screen, at best: a narrower-than-usual browser window and TweetBot.

Laptop screens are generally not wide enough to fit two windows side by side. Even the ones that are, such as your 1080p 15" laptop, are unusable for most of us due to tiny text and so on.

My 15" MBP at 1400x900x2 is wide enough to fit a split editor, or an editor and part of a terminal (I find that having part of a background window visible makes it less jarring to switch to it). I wouldn't mind it being physically taller, but I wouldn't want it to be any narrower.

1440x900 is just enough for me to use Sublime Text 2 in two column mode, or Xcode with the assistant editor. I do have to hide any sidebars for both to be usable.

I stand by earlier post for, say, a web browser or email client.

I can fit two windows on a 1280x800 13" screen just fine. You need applications with little chrome to make it work, though.

I'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are windows users that are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.

I'd disagree with that based on the stereotype of windows users not caring about UI or not noticing the lack of things like smooth animations and awkward sizing.

I say that as a windows user and fan (I have a mac, but it's far from my favorite machine).

I also don't feel that mac is any better at managing two windows than Windows.

Microsoft has tried to improve the side-by-side window set-up with their hot spots, but I feel it is a fairly weak implementation, and even though they advertised the feature heavily in Windows 7, I doubt many people use it regularly.

I didn't mean to say that all windows users do this, or that users of other OSes don't do that, but based on my experience most of the people who work with just one maximized window are windows users.

I don't want to start an OS flamewar though, so I'm going to restate my guess as:

I'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are people who are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.

I cant use an OS without the Window snap functionality of Windows 7/8. Just throw the windows into opposite corners and go. Every time I show people that feature I get a positive reaction but I guess I really have no idea how much they use it.

I suggest you try a tiling window manager, that automates the process.

This is weird.

I use both Windows 7 and OSX everyday. Windows 7's window management is so much better that, it makes me realize how much time I lose managing windows on OSX. The only logical explanation I can come up is that you don't know about snapping windows on Windows 7. Dragging a window to the left or right side of the screen (or with keyboard: Win+Left/Right) will tile it to that part of the screen.

Aero-snap-like utilites have existed on OSX for several years now (and bettersnaptool is free and very powerful).

I'd rather have a built-in unix shell (OSX) and install an aero-snap-alike than deal with Windows+putty+cygwin+...

One can say that he'd rather have a tiling window manager and an environment similar to the one he'll deploy in rather than dealing with various incompatible build systems and the strange mix of BSD environment presented in Mac OS X.

That is to say, all OS suck; and we should not compare dick sizes, as we would all lose.

Windows key + (left or right arrow)

Works fine in Windows, I use it all the time.

window management is indeed better designed on windows (since 7) which makes your parent poster's claim a bit unsubstantiated, but thinking about it a little more there is something to it: Windows applications, especially since the ribbon UI pattern has emerged, are often specifically designed such that you need them to run in fullscreen. Try using office on 950px width and you know what I mean - you simply can't get to lots of control elements comfortably without the full screen width. Mac software on the other hand has always been optimized for multiple non modal panels, still carried over in the prominent info window even in consumer apps. You can place that thing wherever you want. For power users this is very good because they can position these windows as close as possible to the content they want to edit, scroll the window behind without loosing focus (still not a standard windows feature) and do a series of operations minimizing mouse movement and clicks, since a panel of similar operations as their last one stays open. This as well as the always accessible main menu is what allows users to play around width the width of windows.

If only window management and multi screen support were as good as the one on windows - it would pretty much be a perfect classic desktop environment.

I think 16:10 is a great aspect ratio. In OS X on a 13" screen, it's perfect for two 80x25 emacs buffers side by side.

Now extend the screen vertically until it becomes a 4:3 screen. Now you can fit two 80x30 emacs buffers side by side.

But then it's a bigger screen. To maintain the same screen size, you need to extend vertically while narrowing horizontally. Now you can't fit 2 80 column buffers side by side without reducing font size. A 16:10 screen can be treated as two side-by-side 8:10 windows, or basically the same ratio as a piece of letter-sized paper. A 4:3 screen is two side-by-side 2:3 windows, which is substantially narrower than paper size.

Yeah, I think there's a certain width you need to meet before growing vertically is comfortable. A 16:10 12.5" screen I have is wide enough. A 4:3 14" screen I had was barely wide enough.

Once you hit that threshold, going taller is better. And if you're going to be below that threshold anyway, going taller is better, I think.

Of course, this changes from application to application -- when I used an IDE like Visual Studio, there was no hope of putting buffers side by side, and vertical space was all that mattered.

I don't tile web browser windows, either. I'm using a 12.5" 1280x800 screen right now, and it's maximized, with the Windows taskbar on the right side. Using half the screen would be kind of pointless (I'm not reading two documents at once) and I often would like to have a taller screen when web browsing.

(author here) I find a 15" laptop to big to be useable as a laptop. My current one has a 13.3", and that's not enough to open two side-by-side documents showing 80 chars per line each, without having the fonts ridiculously small. remember that font size should be the same regardless the dpi, so having more pixels won't help if the physical size remain the same.

I think you are missing the point of using multiple windows. You don't need to have N number of symmetrical windows all the time. You can have e.g. a small IM window on the side and a twitter client underneath, a terminal at the bottom, etc.

Personally I even like partially overlapping windows, e.g. I can only have part of a terminal visible if I'm tailing a file, I just need to see if something comes and then I can bring it on the front.

So instead of having an aspect ratio that fits computing, you prefer to work around a movie-fitting aspect ratio.

Why do you say that it doesn't fit computing? Perhaps I'm not very OCD, but I don't see why you always need to see the whole window of an app to work efficiently.

But that's just me, even if you prefer tiling windows, you can have many more configurations than the split screen.