> It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.
You can't really blame MS that around the same time screen manufacturers started to switch to 16:9 for cost reasons and cheap laptops all only offered a 1366x786 resolution.
The whole "UIs got smaller because the aspect ratio got more rectangular" thing never really made sense to me because 786 > 600. The screens got bigger in both dimensions, regardless of them getting bigger in one more than they got bigger in the other.
You can't really blame MS that around the same time screen manufacturers started to switch to 16:9 for cost reasons and cheap laptops all only offered a 1366x786 resolution.