When you’re planning to buy a new laptop, screen size is a major factor. A smaller screen means greater portability and often a lower price. Larger screens offer more flexible working methods.
If your laptop is a desktop replacement and rarely leaves home, 17 inches or bigger makes sense. If you’re regularly on a plane, anything above 13 inches can be tricky. Where do you fit in?
Tell us why you choose the size you do in the comments.
Comments
15 responses to “What’s Your Preferred Laptop Screen Size?”
15 inch for me. If I want something smaller, I have a tablet, if I want something bigger, I have my desktop.
Anything less than 15 inch I can’t work on, it’s too small.
Having said that, I’ve gotten used to my desktop’s 3x27inch set up, so I find it hard to work on less these days. Even at work I plug in an extra screen to my laptop.
My laptop is nice and small, 13″ is good for me. Small enough to take with me, not too heavy and big enough to watch or read on the go. I see other family members and friends have 15″ and bigger and they struggle and rather leave it at home, so it turns to a bolted down desktop.
15″ as long as it’s 16:10, which is getting harder and harder to find 🙁
If I need more real estate I’ll plug into bigger desktop monitors.
15 inch for home use. Good trade off between portability and enough screen for gaming.
14 inch for work use (when paired to a dual monitor setup). In my old job which involved running around an enormous office building for lots of meetings and workshops, my 14 inch Dell was easy to tuck under the arm with a stack of papers.
Saying all this though, it’s not size that matters, it’s the resolution and DPI. Love the screen on my XPS 15.
I have a 12″ and i wouldn’t want anything bigger. I owned a 15.4″ for a while and it was too clunky and large. I can carry this one handed, it’s full HD, basically 100% ideal
12 inch for travelling. Mostly due to seat spacing constrains while on the train. 27 screen inch at home connected via HDMI to laptop
15in however there seems to be a spate of 15.6in “HD” Laptops out there with the BS 1366×768 resolution. WTF is that? 15in should be 1680×1050 or Higher.
Screen resolution is far more important to me than screen size. My current laptop was one of only a small bunch that could be had for an affordable price and had a 1920×1080 display.
These days the choice is much wider, and the resolutions higher.
I don’t get where all the votes for 13-14 inch come from – I can’t stand using a lappy under 15 inch.
It comes down to whether you use your laptop as a desktop replacement. There’s a large difference in weight between 15 and 13, especially when the latter often sheds HDD, a disc drive, discrete graphics, etc. When I was studying, I used a 15″ exclusively, but I now use a 13″ MacBook Air as my laptop and have a 24″ screened desktop for home and power.
People who aren’t you.
Nah I get the feeling this articles more about the commentors being confused thinking its “What screen size do you have” as opposed to “whats your preferred size” because 15inch modern ultrabooks work so damn well and don’t feel inconvenient to carry around because their as thin as a tablet.
i have a 15″ hp and it is too big for what i’m planning on using it for next – notes at uni lectures. i’m going to buy a 11″ macbook air and dual boot
I’ve only owned a 12.1 and 11.6 laptops, but I generally prefer my laptop to be the same size as my books (A4).
My current 11.6 is the same size as a A4 book, but the bezels are quite large. I think you could probably fit a 13 in there.