New laptop screens have lower resolutions

Anyone bought a new laptop recently? Anyone?

My four year old laptop is a 1GB, 2.0 GHz pentium. It has a 15" screen, with a maximum resolution of 1440 x 1024. It works beautifully, but after 4 years of manhandling, it has started to show its age. So began the search for a new laptop.

Technology for laptop screens has changed over the years, but I always expected it to get better and cheaper. Surprisingly, it hasn't. All the major laptop companies (Dell, Lenovo, HP) only have widescreen laptops now. They are advertised as 'HD' screens, and the advertised resolution is 720p and 1080p rather than the usual. The worst part is, a 15.6" 720p laptop screen has a maximum screen resolution of 1336 x 768, a lot worse than my 4 year old laptop!

Since I use my laptop for surfing the web and coding, a widescreen is useless to me. My wife and I hardly watch movies on the laptop, so what do we do with the right 25% the screen, which remains barren all the time?

Curious as to why laptop companies would simply stop caring about how people use their laptop, I searched the web for answers. Seems like now the screens come directly from TV manufacturers, who use the same technology to cut laptop screens that they use for your HD TV. This technology seems to be a lot cheaper than that used for the old screens, but it offers such a low resolution that I wonder if we are back in the 90's?