Here’s a rumor I definitely hope doesn’t come true: A 13.3-inch iBook with a resolution of 1280 × 720.

Let me get this straight: the new iBook is going to have a shorter screen than my current iBook? I already place my dock and all my toolbars to the side in order to maximize vertical space on what is now apparently a generous 768-pixel-high screen. Now Apple wants to give me less room?

I could understand shrinking the pixels a bit in order to widen the screen, but why make the overall pixel height smaller? When you work with text, wider is most definitely not better. Text becomes difficult to read when there are more than about 13 or 14 words on a line. So widening the screen really does nothing to improve the experience of someone who works with text.

There are certain times when having a very wide screen can be convenient — for example, when comparing two documents side-by-side. But multiple-columned text has limited application online, where if any vertical scrolling is necessary, reading becomes a painful exercise.

I can certainly understand the “sex appeal” of a “wide screen,” but what we’re really talking about here is not so much a wide screen, but a short screen.

It is also true that my tall screen doesn’t do too well on airplanes. By the time my computer is shoehorned into the tiny space between me and the back of the seat in front of me, I’m often faced with a trade-off between being able to see the monitor and being able to scrunch my arms onto the keyboard without taking out a kidney with my elbow — I have to partially close the lid in order for the keyboard to be a reasonable distance from my body. A shorter screen would solve that problem — but given the fact that perhaps 10 of my total computing hours in a year are aboard planes, I think that’s a trade-off I can manage better than losing 48 precious vertical pixels.

I can also see how Photoshop-hounds might also like to have more horizontal space on the screen for working with photos, etc. However, I also wonder whether they are really prepared to lose those pixels of vertical space. When you account for the menu bar and the space at the top and bottom of a Photoshop window, a 720 pixel screen would be further reduced by 60 pixels, leaving only 660 vertical pixels to work with.

The next version of Mac OS X is supposed to be resolution-independent, which will be a boon for users of small, high-resolution screens. What it means is that users will be able to pick their text size independent of the actual screen resolution. If you want 12-point text to be displayed using 20 pixels, you can do it. I’d love for my 14-inch screen to have double the resolution it currently has, for a sharper picture and more complex graphics, but I don’t want my text, menus, and filenames to be any smaller than they are now. With a resolution-independent OS, I could do that. But I still don’t want a short screen.