Can I just ask: what is up with VGA ports still?

Let's also stick some serial and parallel ports, and maybe a floppy drive on that sucker. Do a lot of people really look for this as a feature still?

I mean, every monitor in the last 10 years now has at least DVI, and most have DVI, HDMI AND DisplayPort. So why not include more of these more modern connections instead of this ridiculously legacy port? It's like finding a hen's tooth trying to find a suitable notebook with displayport (which is kind of important for me)

 

VGA is still widely used today, and DVI wasn't vey wide spread in comparison.

Plus, it's not that much of a hassle o have, cost-wise. I'd rather have an extra feature than to loose it over a buck or two in savings.

Serial ports still have major use today, btw . Two off the top of my head are in business-grade routers and in robotics, both of whIch I've done work in.

 

While monitors have the options you ask for - VGA is still important to hook up notebooks to projectors and older monitors/screens.

Yes, they're still important imo because it is easier to get VGA to DVI to work than display port to VGA...

 

Hmm, didn't think about projectors.

 

I've brought my laptop to school multiple times to do presentations and each time I've needed to hook it up to a projector via VGA. But in that case maybe projectors should start to update...

 

Buying a new TV or monitor in China has been exceptionally annoying. I'd say about half the new ones in stores don't have HDMI or even DVI. You need to pay a premium for HDMI inputs over VGA.

 

Try working in education and you'll see how ridiculously outdated VGA ports are.

 

i brought my envy to present a presentation but i didnt have vga connection so ihad to transfer my presentation to my friends crappy toshiba that still had one... and then he went on bragging about how my newer envy doesnt have something his 3 yr old crappy toshiba has /facepalm. the resolution of the projector was like 480p it made my eyes tear up how bad quality it was

 

Tiller has the gist of it. Take a tour of university classrooms and check what Interface the projectors are using: VGA. We'll be stuck with VGA for a long while now, heck my research supervisor who's using macs has 3 miniDP to VGA dongles, one in his bag, one in his office and I don't know where the third is because he needs to be able to use a projector. I personally would have gone through a lot of rather miserable moments at uni without a VGA port.

 

When you look into it, VGA is an analog video interface. Systems need an analog output for testing and reliability no matter what. When video cards get designed I'm betting one of the last things they add are the digital outputs like LVDS for LCDs and HDMI.

 

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying at all.

 

That doesn't really make sense.
To my knowledge, systems don't need an analog output for testing and reliability - especially when digital output technology has been here for some time now (and is arguably better).
The only conceivable reason I can think of retaining a VGA port is due to the industry not switching projectors and similar output devices completely to digital when GPU's gained the ability to do so.
Many institutions such as schools and businesses use older hardware in these cases because they don't need anything fancy (and they are all about cost efficiency - or expending the least amount of money to get anything done, or even not having money to spend).
If you noticed, various other older hardware remained in laptops for some time before it was finally phased out and people made the switch to newer technologies.
Adoption of newer hardware has been accelerating recently however, so its only a matter of time before VGA and ODD (among others) are gone completely (even now, websites that allow laptop customization have had the ability to remove the ODD and replace it with a HDD).

 

I think HDMI will replace VGA as the defacto standard connector because pretty much every display device has an HDMI input. Plus it carries audio and network too. Perfect. All in one cable.