tobefirst said:
Not sure I can, but my logic:
Being that the monitor is widescreen, I have 1050 vertical pixels, and 1680 horizontal ones. 22 pixels go to the menubar, leaving 1028 vertical pixels to use. Since I like to keep my Dock somewhere in the 40 pixel size range, that leaves me with around 990 useable vertical pixels if the Dock is at the bottom.
This is important because vertical screen real estate is at far more of a premium than horizontal the way I use my computer; the most commonly used things for me are web pages, long HTML documents, text files, and watching videos in a window. None of these things are horizontally limited; all three text formats I keep at between 700 and 1000 pixels wide, depending on the font size, because that's about the comfortable length of a line of text before it gets hard to read. Vertical space, however, is always better, since I can read more without scrolling.
In fact, even with the dock on the left I can still comfortably keep two windows side by side with 5% extra vertical space in both windows, which is an all-around win.
And, in the case of movies, they're almost always 4:3 width:height and I don't usually watch fullscreen; that means that if my dock is on the side, I have 1028X1640 to work with, instead of 988X1680. Since the video is around 4:3, I get 1028X1370 instead of 988X1317 (and in reality, since the QT Player controller is at the bottom, it's even more pronounced than this). Of course, I generally watch them at about double size, so the position of the dock doesn't matter much at all either way.
Furthermore, I don't have 1680 pixels worth of icons in my Dock, ever. In fact, worst case I rarely have more than about 900px worth; that means that I'm wasting a big chunk of space to the left and right of my Dock when it's at the bottom, since that space can't really be used by much.
Finally, some old, badly behaved applications like to open windows that don't respect the Dock. These are no longer an issue, as I can get to resize corner at the bottom of the screen and they rarely open anything all the way to the right (and even if they did, since the dock doesn't go all the way to the bottom right corner, I can still get to the resize thingy).
In all, there are a list of small but real reasons that on a widescreen monitor vertical space is at a premium, so it just makes more sense to have the Dock on the side. It still took a while to readjust to it, but now that I have it's worth it.
[Edit: Extra bonus I just realized: By having windows go all the way to the bottom of the screen, I can take advantage of Fitts Law when reaching for resize corners; with the Dock below them, if I miss I end up launching an unintended app. Even on a miss now, I'd just click the desktop.]
