Dear Mark, why do you think you can get a bit more on with a 16:9 screen? Doesn’t that depend on the actual number of pixels and the panel size, instead of the ratio?

Mathematically speaking, a 16:9 screen is not larger than a 4:3 screen.

And I’m not aware of any manufacturing reasons that allow you to make larger 16:9 screens (or larger 15” 16:9 screens ;-)) than you can do with 4:3. That doesn’t mean there aren’t - e.g. backlight might be easier with wide screens.

As for “organizing your apps on your screen more efficiently”, I don’t see any reason why this should be easier with 16:9. Sure, you can now probably put your favourite IM window besides your word processor at the same time; but is that actually better? I prefer keeping stuff on different virtual screens anyway; and actually on my 4:3 screen I could already do that pretty well (it has 135 dpi; I can just read a typical A4 paper at this resolution, and I could have my IM window next to that of course.

Having a wide screen just makes web pages look bad. ;-)

Oh, and my glasses are pretty close to 4:3 ;-) but with round corners.