I don’t understand why anyone thinks it is a reasonable decision to buy the coarsest low resolution screen available for actual work purposes. Bravo, you saved $40 once – and pay with years of low productivity.
As a beancounter can say, "Hey, I saved us $8000 (200 laptops)! Now where's my promotion?", and the low productivity won't be your problem - you might not even realise it. So it's very easy to understand, actually.
The thought probably is that people will get an external monitor and rarely use their laptops without an external monitor, either at home or at work, save for meetings and perh during mass transit commutes.
Personally, screen real estate is the second most important metric as far as productivity goes, after RAM (I usually have a lot of browser tabs and terminals open). I usually use two 2k monitors and my Macbook Pro's retina screen when developing. I would definitely feel severely hampered by a single screen with 768p resolution.
I find the opposite, 2 or more screens tends to distract me more than it helps. I'm more productive on my 1366x768 13" screen as long as I have a decent window manager (i3, tmux) that can actually manage your windows. I'd do this all day if the ergonomics were better.
For me, no matter how fast I can switch windows, it's still faster just to glance at another monitor. And if I need to say, look at some example code in a browser, while having my own code open in an editor, as well as another terminal for reading output, it quickly gets very cramped at 1366x768.
I don’t understand why anyone thinks it is a reasonable decision to buy the coarsest low resolution screen available for actual work purposes. Bravo, you saved $40 once – and pay with years of low productivity.