I absolutely abhor 16:9 on laptops, one of the reasons why I'm using a macbook air is for the excellent 16:10 screen. If you go shopping for ordinary PC laptops in the $1000-1300 (USD) price range at a place like Best Buy and take a look at the quality of the LCDs, it's amazing how many absolutely shit 16:9 1920x1080 displays are being sold on machines at the same price as the macbook air's higher-dpi retina display.
16:9 on a desktop seems to be unavoidable these days, and indeed there's the whole popular trend of ultrawide/ultrawide-and-curved monitors now which go way beyond that.
I don't mind 16:9 so much as the incredibly poor choices for resolution and panel quality I'm faced with on most Windows laptops lately. It feels like TV salespeople took over and completely ignored what actually makes sense for a laptop.
1080p and 4K are both terrible choices for 13-14" screens, yet that's all you see anymore, and even on higher end models trying to get accurate info on panel quality and color accuracy is a nightmare.
I'm curious: why do you care about aspect ratio vs. (effective) resolution? Seems like an odd thing to focus on, when it has nothing to do with how much stuff you can display on screen. Do you mean at comparable sizes?
I care about both simultaneously - in my experience the common 1920x1080 laptop panels also have poor color rendition, poor brightness and overall image quality, in addition to not being a suitable dpi. I can see the blockiness and jagginess in fonts and GUI at 1920x1080 native.
And scrolling vertically for anything is painful on a small 16:9 screen. The macbook happens to have both 16:10 aspect ratio and a higher quality LCD.
But lower resolution than a 4k 16:9 display (and no oled). So the question is why to prefer lower res 16:10 (lower in both directions) to 16:9? You just have strictly more screen, which seems better.
4k gets you sharper text but the distance of the display away from you makes for diminishing returns in sharpness combined with horrific battery life and still 16:9. The macbook is very much a happy middle for normal use but I'm sure a Samsung Galaxy Book 4K is the best movie laptop ever
I was comparing laptops in the price range mentioned above, MacBook air vs 1080p laptops. If you go up to around $2000, then the windows 10 laptops start to have 4k screens.
16:9 on a desktop seems to be unavoidable these days, and indeed there's the whole popular trend of ultrawide/ultrawide-and-curved monitors now which go way beyond that.