Vlad Savov, writing for The Verge:

With all of these horizontal bars invading our vertical space, a 16:9 screen quickly starts to feel cramped, especially at the typical laptop size. You wind up spending more time scrolling through content than engaging with it.

Some might argue that 16:9 is more accommodating for visual creative tasks, like video or photo editing, but I’ve done both (primarily in Adobe’s software suite) on a laptop, and the wider screen doesn’t help much. The experience is better than when I’m composing an email with acres of disused white space either side of my text, but not by a lot. Lateral space is simply not as valuable as vertical space in desktop apps or on the web.

I couldn’t agree more. After three years with an iPad Air 2 as my primary computing device, I firmly believe that widescreen displays are terrible for general purpose computing.