VGA is incredible to have, yes, even in 2019. As a sibling comment says, it's "for the people who actually have to solve problems". Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI. So there's an adapter. But maybe the damned fragile thing is broken, or it's missing, or it doesn't adapt to what you have (mini display port? USB-C? Who even knows!) or it requires power, or God knows what.
There are a number of times I've had to present something, and the "non-VGA" laptop crowd was unable to, for various reasons, but a VGA port will cut the crap and get you an image on screen no matter what. It's wet? Stepped on it? Bent pins? It'll still work, dammit. Maybe your slides will have a blue tint, but you'll get em up there.
I'll give a personal example. I was at a party and the movie dude didn't show. Only thing available was a banged up projector from the 90s with analog only inputs. Everyone had new fancy laptops with no VGA. Someone had a totally destroyed old laptop with water damage, screen falling off, but you know what it had? Most of a VGA port. I bent off a few pieces of a paperclip, shoved em in there, pointed that old projector at the side of a house, and filled the night sky with sixty feet of glorious analog pixels.
I'd expect more support for VGA in a place like this. It doesn't just guarantee your slides will get up on screen, it's a real hacker's port, dammit!
Oh yeah, the i2c interface disguised as DDC is my favorite part. With a few wires, you can interface any i2c eeprom with command-line tools.
But projectors, oh yeah, I hear ya. VGA came out in 1987 and rapidly became ubiquitous. I think the Intel Skylake in 2015 finally shipped without integrated VGA, that's as clear a mark as you'll find for the closing of a chapter.
And the coolest thing is, except for a few weird VGA-on-EGA-connector attempts in the very early years, VGA has always been one single standard connector for the entire 28 years of its existence. And it's not gone, not by a long shot. That decades-long legacy means it's the standard you're going to include if you want your shit to be compatible with as much as possible.
Until my very most recent Thinkpad, I've had VGA the whole time, and got quite accustomed to mocking the portless people (principally Mac folks) when they'd show up without their adapters. "If your machine doesn't have the ports it needs to survive in the world, it is incumbent upon YOU to carry the adapter dongles", I'd sneer at them. "Your vendor invents a new port every few months, I'm not going to stock all those adapters on your behalf."
Welp, the march of time is inexorable, and I'm now the schmuck toting around a Mini-DisplayPort-to-VGA dongle that just takes up space in my bag and I know someday I'm gonna leave it out because I haven't used it in forever. That will therefore be the day I'm faced with a room full of Director-level people I need to impress, and the wrong variant of HDMI-DVI-Thunderport-Nano-MHL-whatever. And I know that damn projector still has a VGA port, just in case.
Bah. VGA needs to die. The number of times I needed to do a presentation and find out they only have a VGA projector....for a product with a GUI that just is not designed for that low resolution (on purpose.) To be honest I do not think I own anything that is not 4K anymore that is a daily use item. I still have retro computers, etc. but every TV, monitor and modem system is now 4K.
The majority of projectors in use (even if they do have HDMI) don't support 4K. Even if you buy a new projector you have to put some effort into getting something that supports 4K (unlike say a TV where it's basically standard). I imagine there are even newly built conference rooms / lecture theatres that don't have 4K projectors for cost reasons.
Oh and then you need a laptop that supports it. If you laptop is more than a few years old, it probably can't output 4K60.
Sorry, I mixed two items here. Projectors need to take HDMI and support 1080P. Instead half the time I get handed a VGA cable and stuck at 1024x768 or worse 800x600 I should have separated the two rants. :)
There are a number of times I've had to present something, and the "non-VGA" laptop crowd was unable to, for various reasons, but a VGA port will cut the crap and get you an image on screen no matter what. It's wet? Stepped on it? Bent pins? It'll still work, dammit. Maybe your slides will have a blue tint, but you'll get em up there.
This is also the advantage that analog signals have over digital ones: HDMI is basically all-or-nothing (especially when HDCP DRM decides it's doesn't like something), but analog VGA degrades far more gracefully.
At one of the places I used to work, the HDMI-VGA adapters seemed to die surprisingly frequently, and also got very hot even when they worked.
It'd have to be designed with lots of error correction for degraded channels, which most often it isn't. Analog solutions work until the point you physically can't hear or see things through the noise.
> Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI
I can’t remember the time I saw a projector that didn’t have an HDMI port. Are these in a niche you frequent? The consumer and semi-professional ones I run into at libraries, Meetup spaces, and offices all have HDMI and sometimes DisplayPort. They sometimes have VGA or one of the ones that look like VGA but have more pins.
I've had to plug in to quite a number of projectors; I've owned ~5 myself in the last few years. I've used projectors in conference centers, at YCombinator events, startup spaces, universities... Maybe 5% (and that is generous) had HDMI. Almost all of these were high end projectors, in pretty nice spots (in the US/Europe.) Furthermore, as someone else noted, if it's a mounted TV or projector, even if it does have HDMI I've never seen it be accessible.
I think new consumer projectors are far more likely to have HDMI than professional projectors though. A quick look at Amazon confirmed my suspicion that HDMI is a heavily advertised feature for consumer projectors and is almost always important enough to be in the title. Companies, meeting centers and universities are all likely to order from a non-Amazon source. Which is good, because on Amazon I just had to scroll my way through weird advertisements for "VANKYO", "GUDEE", "Dr. J", "DHAWS" and "OKCOO" (adorned with ugly "2019" badges like terrible spam Android apps) before making my way to a single legitimate projector brand.
Even for consumer projectors, though, I think HDMI is fairly recent and will take some time to get out there. When I was shopping for a new consumer projector two years ago, there weren't any with HDMI that fit my modest demands for brightness and quality, but that seems to have changed.
Hah, how could anyone forget them? lp0 on fire and daisy chained dongles (back when dongles were dongles), those were the days :)
That said, I think the parallel port died out not too long ago. I remember the serial port went first (2003?), then a few years later (2005?) the parallel port went, which caused a number of people to think their parallel ports were serial ports. I know nearly anything with XP had both, and most things with Vista had neither, though; they both did die pretty fast.
Totally. I remember building a LPT to IDE adapter to connect an IDE drive to my PDP-11 clone computer around 1994, and my friend wrote a driver for it... it worked!
Just last week I presented a project on a TV from my 2017 MacBook Pro. I used a USB-C to HDMI adapter to connect to the HDMI to VGA connector to the VGA cable to the TV. I had to reconnect it three times and open and close the laptop to get it to work properly.
Sometimes the tv is mounted and only a vga cable is left around to interface with. Good luck plugging in the hdmi cable into the tv mounted in a cabinet.
The TV is new, it might actually be a huge monitor. There just was no HDMI cable in the room. The TV still has a VGA connector (and cable!) on it though.
Add to that the software support issues. So many times the adapter will disconnect/ make weird colors / refuse to set the right resolution etc. Reminds me how many times i lended my thinkpad because “the adapter doesnt work”
There are a number of times I've had to present something, and the "non-VGA" laptop crowd was unable to, for various reasons, but a VGA port will cut the crap and get you an image on screen no matter what. It's wet? Stepped on it? Bent pins? It'll still work, dammit. Maybe your slides will have a blue tint, but you'll get em up there.
I'll give a personal example. I was at a party and the movie dude didn't show. Only thing available was a banged up projector from the 90s with analog only inputs. Everyone had new fancy laptops with no VGA. Someone had a totally destroyed old laptop with water damage, screen falling off, but you know what it had? Most of a VGA port. I bent off a few pieces of a paperclip, shoved em in there, pointed that old projector at the side of a house, and filled the night sky with sixty feet of glorious analog pixels.
I'd expect more support for VGA in a place like this. It doesn't just guarantee your slides will get up on screen, it's a real hacker's port, dammit!