And chunky plastic builds with easily user-replaceable parts.
And nice full 7 row keyboards that felt good to type on.
And rounded laptop edges so it doesn't kill your wrists.
And ports, lots of ports.
The 16:9 craze drives me mad: it's jack of all trades master of none, compromise every other way. Maybe nice to watch TV shows, not really good to watch movies, not tall enough for a single screen, not wide enough to 50:50 split left/right (each side is too narrow). Putting two side by side makes you face the bezels, and constant-tilt your head either left or right when you focus. Three side by side is way too wide. Probably why some folks put three but have the two outmost ones be vertical. Which brings me to 9:16 which is way too thin AND tall.
A triple head 4:3 setup was terrible for movies, but reaaaally nice for a battlestation. Maybe 5:4 would have been quite something but I never experienced that.
I do like the Ultrawide things though, 2.4:1 feels like two 4:3, only continuous, no bezel in the middle. 3.5:1 is technically about two 16:9 but feels like triple head 4:3. They're especially comfortable when curved, but damn, none are HiDPI, which kind of ruins it. And of course that's kind of a no-go for laptops (or maybe not, but I bet the manufacturer attempting that would somehow botch the execution)
I split each monitor down the middle, treating it essentially as a viewport for two windows. Optionally I sometimes fill one screen with a single window, but I never overlap screens. On my home computer running Linux (Cinnamon) this functionality is built in; on my work laptop running macOS, I use Rectangle to accomplish the same thing.
I did have three 19" 4:3 CRTs, way back when - beautiful Sun Trinitrons. They took up the entire desk, but I could conveniently stack equipment on top of them (speakers, a clock, an FM radio, etc), because they were so large. But my workflow for those was different - each monitor _was_ a single window, as splitting them resulted in windows that were too narrow to be useful.
The 3:2 displays available on Surface tablet devices are also great, although my Surface Go is a tad small for more than one window at a time.
In my experience, a big enough 16:9 display also works as a 4:3 in practice – a 55” 4K OLED TV is great for this. It’s like a 2880 × 2160 4:3 display… with three little 960x720 4:3 displays next to it, heh. Window managers can enforce the split. It’s nice!
I briefly tried my 65” LG OLED TV as my monitor. It didn’t have the backlight problem at all but the auto dimming of white screen areas was too distracting to be usable.
I’ve now gone to 2x 32” 4K monitors. It’s okay but either too wide if both monitors are horizontal or one is too tall if I turn one vertical.
I’d like to revisit using a large OLED again when their use as monitors has matured a little. With a little software tweaking for window management, it was almost perfect.
Nearly any desktop has user-replaceable parts, and so do many laptops. Laptops get to be compact and lightweight, so they are very tight internally. An Amiga wasn't too easily portable, to say nothing of an Amstrad.
Keyboard quality differed drastically: an Amiga or a Yamaha MSX had nice keys, but good luck typing on a Spectrum ZX.
