How small of a laptop screen are you willing to use on a day to day basis?

Is a 12" screen too small? Is 15" also too small?

Did screen size play a major role in the laptop your chose? What do you do on a daily basis on your laptop (besides TW and porn)?

 

Laptops can be used for more than that? Lies

 

15" is minimum. Otherwise pages don't show properly and functionality really is limited.

I like small for mobility. But laptops need function.

I have a 17" for my work laptop and its too friggin big for placing on car seats.

 

13-14 is sweet spot to me for usage and portability (typically carry 2 for work)

I care way more about resolution though, 1366x768 is crap. 1080 is ok.

 

15" is about perfect. Happy medium between screen real-estate and portability.

With that said, my wife has a 17" LG gram and that is the same footprint as my 15" work laptop, and about half the weight. So I like the 17" when it fits the same space as a traditional 15".

15" laptops also tend to have a 10 key on the keyboard which is a must for me. Smaller laptops just don't have the physical space to have this feature.

 

My current daily driver is a 13" MacBook Pro M1, and I've been using 13" screens for ever. Why? Because I'm often traveling or in meetings and dragging around a big'ol laptop is a pain in the shoulder (literally.) 13" can still get email and other work done, and when I'm at my desk I've got 34" screen with a full size keyboard. I've had 13, 15 and 17" laptops and for some of my uses even 17" isn't big enough, so I've always had a big desktop monitor in addition. It really depends on your use case. In our architectural meetings the architects all have bigger laptops because they're trying to show CAD drawings on the conference room screens. Some of my coworkers even use iPads for their meeting work.

 

It depends for me, on what I am doing on the system.

When I was in school a few years ago, I was perfectly fine with my MacBook's 15" built in display. For doing basically one thing at a time (research for school, writting papers, etc.) it was fine for me. My wife and I also used to stream Netflix on it before we got out 49" TV a few years ago.

For my work, I am in the IT field, in a NOC (Network Operations Center), and I have a zillion things to keep my eyes on at all times - multiple different environment monitoring applications [SolarWinds, DynaTrace, Splunk,....], our incident ticketing system, email, Zoom chat session s with my team, our company Service Desk, etc....... All of these things must be monitored real time during my entire shift, so I need huge amounts of screen real estate, and 15" doesn't get the job done. I have the laptop (Company provided Dell, not my own MacBook) 15" display, a 22" external Dell monitor, and my own external 27" Samsung monitor, and it still isn't nearly as much as I would prefer.