I'm at home in Houston for the holidays and of course working on Picplum stuff when I'm not chasing my 18-month old nephew around. I'm used to working on my 27-inch Apple display so hacking away on the Air's native resolution took was not quite for me. Most importantly after a few days of working my back started hurting from hunching over the laptop screen. Purchasing a 20-something-inch display to keep at home would be a worthy sub-$200 investment.

Off to Best Buy I went. Nope, no monitors with 1920x1200 resolution. Only widescreen 1080 vertical res ones. No biggie I thought, Best Buy only caters to people chasing buzzwords like widescreen. I headed off to nerd mecca: MicroCenter (okay, not quite Fry's but it was closer).

I went racing up and down their aisles of monitors. Argh, the same thing; they only had 1920x1080 resolution monitors. The salesman asked why I would ever need 1200 vertical res when 1080 was the "widescreen standard." I must have been the only person to ever walk in there with the intention of programming and not gaming or watching movies. He asked why I don't just use the monitor vertically. I asked him to show me the monitors they had that swiveled. They didn't carry any.

I came home with a $150 23-inch, 1920x1080 Samsung SyncMaster SA300 LED-backlit display (aside: damn these things are cheap nowadays!).

Why don't they make 1920x1200 monitors anymore?

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