Why did they make the Surface Book with a 3:2 aspect ratio and put 3000x2000 pixels on a 13" screen?

I primarily use my Surface Book for trading using Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, Microsoft Office 365 and for my photography avocation using Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop CC subscription.

The native aspect ratio for 35 mm photography is 3:2.  Being able to see and work with my full frame photos at native 3:2 resolution on my Surface Book 3:2 3000 x 2000 screen is absolutely incredible.

All of the applications I use scale to 3000 x 2000 beautifully. Having the additional real-estate of 3:2 for all my applications is truly liberating. 

After using the 3:2 aspect ratio there is no way I would ever want to go back to the old elongated, squat 16:9 "movie" ratio.  Quite frankly, after using 3:2 with my Surface hardware for the past year and a half, 16:9 now looks weird to me.

3:2 is a strange aspect ratio, however 3000x2000 is just beautiful. Note that Macbook Retina 13-inch has 2560x1600 native resolution. 

The issue with SB is that some applications are not designed to display properly on a scaled resolution. As far as I know, this is Microsoft's first try on a scaled display with super high native resolution. They still have a lot of bugs to fix.

I'm motivated to respond here simply because we live in a world of people who seem to think 16:9 is a suitable screen ratio for computing, so much so that it's become almost impossible to find laptops and displays that aren't 16:9.

16:9 is an absolutely terrible screen ratio for computing.

For me, the single most important reason to get a Surface Book is the screen ratio.  I made up my mind 5 or 6 years ago to never spend money on a 16:9 laptop, and I have stuck to it.  What this means is that after my 2006 laptop died (Toshiba with 16:10 display) I simply had to live without a laptop for a while, sometimes awkwardly making do with a work-issued 16:9 laptop (insufferable).  I eventually bought a MacBook Air with a 16:10 display which is Boot Camped and running Windows.  I've never been able to buy anything else because all the PC manufacturers switched to 16:9 screens for the sole purpose of saving money.  Some people think their screens got wider.  What they really got was shorter (vertically).  In order to have the same kind of screen real estate in a 16:9 lappy that I had on my 15" Toshiba, I would have to buy a 17" or larger (does larger even exist?) laptop.

Things that are awful to do in 16:9 include:

• Programming (my job)
• Spreadsheets
• PDFs/DOCs other text documents
• Photo editing
• Video editing
• Audio editing
• Web browsing
• Graphic design
• 4:3 videos
• Some games

Things that 16:9 is good for:

• Movies
• Some games

I think these lists make the problem pretty evident.  16:9 is not good for using computer software, it's only good for movies.  There are much better devices for watching movies than laptops.  Obviously, the best is a TV.  If you're going mobile, then use a tablet.  I guess some strange people use their phones, even.  So why, then, if 16:9 is not good for computing but is good for entertainment, did virtually all manufacturers change to this ratio on their displays?  In other words, why did they make computers more geared toward the thing they aren't meant for (entertainment) and less geared toward the thing they are meant for (computing)?  The answer is cost.  They stripped away a bit of vertical space and made a concession to the Asian companies who cheaply churn out LCD displays by getting rid of the variety of ratios that had to be manufactured.  They bet on people being not observant enough to care, and to a great extent they won that bet.  Thankfully Apple did not capitulate, and now other manufacturers have started to realize how terrible their 16:9 laptops are, especially when trying to shrink them ever more to sizes well under 15".  I could not commend Microsoft enough on the Surface Book and its decision to go with a work-friendly aspect ratio.  Unless other manufacturers get their acts together on this, the Surface Book with performance base WILL be my next computer.  Just gotta save a little coin!

 I actually just returned my surface book for this exact reason. I hate the aspect ratio, I work in excel all day where I need to see spreadsheets wide, Square is useless. Same with our order entry system through salesforce it is also super wide where you have to normally scroll back and forth to see everything.  I also just can't get over how old this computer looks, I just spent $2000 on a laptop and when I see it sitting on my desk I feel like it is a Mac from 10 years ago with a square screen. When everyone else in my office walks by with their ThinkPad it really makes the surface look old and square.

That seems just a bit strange reasoning to me. I use Excel a lot too. The Surface Book screen is just as wide as any 13" notebook screen, but it is a lot taller. So I get the same spreadsheet width but I get a lot more information top-to-bottom which I find invaluable. I'd certainly never trade my 3:2 aspect ratio for a scrunched-down and flattened 16:9 ratio.

See, there's so much discussion about 16:9 being horrible for things - but I actually prefer it.  I just see it as basically the same thing - just expanded to show more info on the left and right...  I mean 2000 vertical pixels is just that...  It doesn't matter if it's 3000 wide or 4000 wide...  The height doesn't change...  Just now there's more room each side for content.  Eg. if you do a 'fit to screen' the content will look pretty much the same.  And with 16:9 I can have 2 Word documents open side by side and cut/paste between w/only switching focus and not needing to move one window "to the back" and out of site...  As someone whose job is more around writing documents or comparing/researching, the wide display is so much better than a 3:2 or 4:3 could be for me.

And for people like the people doing photographs/editing - full screen on 16:9 is not ideal for presenting but I would assume using something like photoshop (3:2 or 4:3) where you have tools on the left 'and' the right it's actually a lot easier to work with the image as it would fit easier to the top of the monitor and the bottom instead of having the "black bars" on the top and bottom of the image.

For awhile I had my center 16:9 monitor turned to Portrait mode - so 9:16 I guess.  For Word and Excel I now had significantly more vertical information than before and the ribbon/toolbars at the top didn't take up so much of the screen.  It was great...  Problem is that it was a 30" monitor and I kept looking "up" which made my neck sore after long days and switched back after a couple of months.  And for cutting/pasting i went away from my side-by-side windows and had to use another monitor because all my main display became good for was "one document at a time".

Anyway - I think there are merits for both but 16:9 is getting too bad of a rap.  I think it's more on the application developers (mostly MSFT) to not embrace the wide angle in things outside of Outlook or Powerpoint.  If they had a decent ribbon on the left that took up an 1/8 of the screen and another on the right for optional info or settings, you would essentially be left with a more traditional window to manipulate your data - whatever it is...