Computer monitors are getting wider and shorter, and the reason has nothing to do with computers.
The panels being fitted to new monitors are increasingly the same shape as a television, and the ones they are replacing were slightly taller. The difference sounds trivial and costs you around a hundred and twenty rows of pixels at a given width, which is roughly six lines of text, permanently, on everything you ever do.
Vertical space is what computing actually consumes. A document is tall. A web page is tall. Code is tall, and a spreadsheet is tall, and the only common activity that wants a wide short rectangle is watching a film.
So why the change? Because monitor panels come out of factories built for televisions, and a plant cutting sheets for television production yields more usable panels if everything is the same proportion. Computer displays are a secondary line running through equipment optimised for something else, and the shape of a cinema screen from the 1950s is now determining how many lines of a document you can see at once.
Nobody decided this was better for the person using it. It fell out of manufacturing, and it is being marketed as a feature because it has already happened.
The other change is genuine and worth having. Replacing the fluorescent tubes behind the panel with light-emitting diodes gives more consistent brightness across the surface, allows a much thinner enclosure, removes the mercury, and lights up instantly rather than warming for a minute. It also costs more, which is why it is appearing at the top of ranges first.
One caution on that. Some implementations put the diodes around the edge and shine the light inward, which is cheap and thin and produces exactly the uneven corners the technology was supposed to fix. Others place them behind the whole panel, which works properly and costs considerably more. Both are advertised with the same three letters.
In January I wrote that televisions are chosen under shop lighting that flatters the wrong qualities. Monitors have the opposite problem. They are chosen on a specification sheet where the one number that matters most is the one nobody thinks to compare.