Panasonic's New Laptops Could Be the Final Death Knell For the Humble VGA Port (tomshardware.com) 80
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier today, Panasonic announced refreshed models of its long-established Let's Note laptop series. However, for the first time in its history, we have a Let's Note portable that doesn't have a VGA port. According to a report by Nikkei Japan, this is probably the beginning of the end for laptops sporting VGA output, with "other companies to follow suit."
A number of factors have precipitated Panasonic's removal of the venerable VGA port. The Nikkei report highlights the strong competition from HDMI, which can simultaneously transmit audio. We also see that the new Panasonic Let's Note CF-SC6 models feature a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, which can also be used for video out. That's three separate ports remaining on the Let's Note to drive external displays.
A number of factors have precipitated Panasonic's removal of the venerable VGA port. The Nikkei report highlights the strong competition from HDMI, which can simultaneously transmit audio. We also see that the new Panasonic Let's Note CF-SC6 models feature a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, which can also be used for video out. That's three separate ports remaining on the Let's Note to drive external displays.
What the fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty well every major server vendor still uses VGA for the video output. A few months ago I built yet another rig for my lab desks with a multiport VGA / USB KVM and a pikvm because all the stuff that is important still uses VGA. Pretty sad really.
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yep. there's a huge number of VGA/USB KVMs out there in server farm world.
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(The below is not an attack on you, writing this after I wrote the main bit I realized it came across as blaming you for VGA! Just to clarify. What I'm saying is I think it's weird to continue with VGA ports at all, I know you're just the bearer of accurate bad news.)
VGA to HDMI or DP and HDMI or DP to VGA widgets are almost as cheap as VGA or HDMI/DP cables. Seems weird to continue to have VGA at all, even in server spaces, VGA is objectively inferior to HDMI or DP so why continue to use it, even if it's n
Re:What the fuck (Score:4, Interesting)
VGA made all the sense in the world at the time when it was invented. Volumes were lower, using existing connectors kept costs down, you could support a variety of sync options with the available pins, etc. It was a lot cheaper than the 13W3 connector, and a lot smaller. Quality cables would provide a very low blur experience from a quality RAMDAC, I used to have a .22 pitch Cornerstone monitor on VGA at above HD resolutions and it was decently crisp with quality cards. The maximum video output resolution at the time it was invented didn't strain the limits of cabling, either.
Today obviously there's not a good reason to keep using analog signals to displays, and making new display devices with VGA no longer makes sense. It's cheaper to do a digital signal (not least due to savings on cabling) and the results are better.
Also, EDIDs have not gone anywhere, and they often still suck. The EDID for my TV is totally bonkers. It gives a completely wrong display size, and device model number! I downloaded it from the display using nvidia-settings, edited it with wxedid and loaded the new version from my xorg.conf, which solved my scaling problems. And this is a totally modern system, everything including the display is from the last year or two.
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It won't be long before there aren't any VGA panels lying around anymore. It's not like they have it on most new monitors. Will that be when server builders finally start using a mo
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Was asking the same thing. I don't think I've had a VGA port on ...my last 3? 4 laptops?
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My laptop has a VGA port. I did buy it in 2010 though. No excuse for the modem port which I've never used.
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VGA dongles (Score:4, Informative)
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blockquoteA lot of old projectors used in business conference rooms are still stuck on VGA. That's why./blockquote
Are they? Most projectors now have been upgraded to handle HD video resolutions - the VGA ones usually maxed out around 1024x768 or so and people have been upgrading to 1080p or better projectors for quite a while now. Even the lame "portable" projector crap with 640x480 resolutions have HDMI inputs.
In fact, many places dumped their projectors for cheap large screen TVs using HDMI well over a de
Re: What the fuck (Score:2)
You can do HD resolutions just fine over VGA so that's not the differentiator, it's just how old are they. I find the premise suspicious as well, though. That would have to be some pretty old protectors.
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Bear in mind what we're talking about if we're looking at a projector with a VGA port: any projector that old almost certainly still uses an incandescent light source, justifying a noisy fan, and with a bulb that needs to be replaced at high expense periodically. It's almost certainly limited in resolution, probably to 1024x768. By the time 1080p projectors became a thing, digital inputs were considered critical. A low cost projector suitable for showing a presentation in a large meeting room is a few hundr
Projector vs building (Score:4, Informative)
There's the corner case (big auditoriums) where the projector can be upgrade, and probably has been for something that also supports HDMI.
But the wiring between the lectern in front of the auditorium and the projector pod in the ceiling is part of the building and would require tear downs and rebuilds which in turn would require complicated paperwork and expensive procedures.
So some places decide to keep the cabling in place until building renovation are due when they could piggy back the cabling upgrade.
One solution that some go for is to keep VGA as the standard even if the projector could do better, and add converters at the lectern (a large collection of what-ever-to-VGA dongles attached on a keychain).
A different solution is to keep the wiring but carry a more modern signal over it (some projector even support getting HDMI or so signals over their VGA port so you don't need to put a wiring adapter at the projector's side). It surprisingly works (lot of place have over-specced their VGA wiring and it's mostly good enough for HDMI signals). This is also the origin of the reason why passive HDMI-to-VGA cables are a thing on AliExpress (and Amazon I guess?)
Re:What the fuck (Score:4, Funny)
I seem to vaguely recall some tech YouTuber who referred to it as the "Jurassic port".
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Indeed. My 3 year old Lenovo E14 never had a VGA port. I have one on the USB dock though.
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I still use VGA because of my OmniCube KVMs from Y2K. I am amazed that they still work from almost daily usages.
I want my RS-232 (Score:3)
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And some really picky old equipment has trouble with the USB adapters
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IME at least having a genuine PL2303 chip helps, there are a ton of knockoffs or even better one with the FTDI chip of which there are even more knockoffs unfortunately.
Re: I want my RS-232 (Score:3)
IME it only matters under Windows. Competent operating systems have a driver that supports all of those chips and clones just fine. As a Linux user I can give zero fucks for which chip it is. I can expose it as a serial port to a virtual machine instead of as USB and solve problems that way, too.
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False, there are very much hardware related limitations in the timing portions of many USB dongles. I use Linux a lot for hobby development (where RS-232 is still a simple easy protocol to implement thanks to every uC supporting UART), and yes even in Linux there are several dongles in my draw of shit that have labelles on them such as "57600" because the hardware is rubbish and can't communicate at full rate.
There's no difference between windows and linux in this regard.
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The maximum speed attained is not the primary difference; which driver you have to use for Windows (because not all of the knockoffs work well with the same drivers) and whether the chip will work reliably at any speed is.
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Other way around. Cheap USB adapters have trouble producing proper RS-232 signals. It's a timing issue, an ebay issue, and a fake parts issue. I went through an action where I work to throw away every USB adapter that I found and replace it with one which we had internally type tested as working with all our hardware.
Unfortunately it's a case of you get what you pay for. I've never had a $60+ USB-RS232 adapter fail to communicate.
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yup, got a drawerful of USB-serial adapters that no longer work
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You can get thunderbolt (i.e. pcie over a cable) to pcie, so you can plug a proper serial port card into a USB shaped slot. If you get imaginative daisychaining cards, you might be able to jimmy an old ISA serial card into there for shiggles.
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Oh yeah for vaguely semi-portable stuff then definitely, yes. Speaking of which, modern ports really suck at positive locking. Modular connectors are cheap and cheerful but at least they do lock. USB has no blessed locking standard. There is usb3-vision which is pretty decent but it has zero adoption outside of computer vision cameras.
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Oh yeah for vaguely semi-portable stuff then definitely, yes. Speaking of which, modern ports really suck at positive locking. Modular connectors are cheap and cheerful but at least they do lock. USB has no blessed locking standard. There is usb3-vision which is pretty decent but it has zero adoption outside of computer vision cameras.
DisplayPort has a decent locking mechanism that is not very intrusive. I'd like to see something like that for USB that would be optional so you could use locking or non-locking connectors/devices at your own discretion. Of course I'm retired now so it no longer matters to me.
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Haha always forget about foullsized display port. The usb3 vision standard has optional little screws. The cables will work in almost all normal usb ports, and any cable will work in one of those ports, but if you have both the right cable and port you can party like it's 1999.
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I'd never heard of it before you mentioned it so it seems pretty well confined to the A/V world.
Even more niche, basically industrial computer vision cameras (something I work with as it happens). Then they get to charge $150 for a long cable, but you know it has the screws on the end and it's certified for the camera and are you really going to risk a hundred thousand dollar job over that? Of course not so they have you by the goolies.
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Eh, I have no trouble with USB-C to RJ-45 cables. I had way more trouble with the device end than the computer end before everybody finally settled on the same pinout (at one job we had to have a basket of adapters with every combination of DB-9, DB-25, male, female, and null-modem - that was the real PITA). Use quality USB adapters with genuine FTDI chips and they "just work" everywhere (including my phone and tablet).
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Re: I want my RS-232 (Score:1)
I recently came across a 'laptop' with no processor/ram/storage - it is just a FHD display, keyboard & trackpad with a battery. It's a 'crash cart' in laptop form, with HDMI for video and a USB for keyboard & trackpad (Amazon link - https://a.co/d/hv7GuTi [a.co] ).
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It also have USB-C for a single cable connection. Pretty cool device with smartphones and tablets having a desktop mode.
oh, the horror! (Score:5, Funny)
no VGA?
What's next? removing the RS-232 and Centronics ports? Or (*shudder*) the floppy drive itself?
PCMCIA (Score:2)
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It's Japan. It wasn't that long ago that the dropped optical drives, and you can still buy new USB floppy drives.
Let's Note, known as Toughbooks in the west, are no nonsense machines that are supposed to just work. You might find an old conference room with just VGA, so they have a port.
I bet you can still order it with a USB to VGA adapter. Or HDMI to VGA.
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Well, lately I see a disturbing trend of laptops without Ethernet ports, and personally I really, REALLY hate this.
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I know. Unfortunately, I've yet to see an USB Ethernet dongle that can give a latency comparable to the real thing.
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Presentation systems in countless meeting rooms suddenly go dark and we need to replace hundreds of billions of equipment. Frankly , ask business owners to fork out for what used to work perfectly fine in their meeting rooms , they do not like it.
I don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: I don't get it. (Score:3)
Japan is notorious for using technologies long past their expiration date in the rest of the world. VGA still works for many.
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Japan still relies heavily on fax machines
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Is there something special about the range that means they've kept VGA ports longer than pretty much every other brand out there? I know Apple have historically been quicker to dump legacy ports but their portables had already dropped VGA in favour of DVI twenty years ago. I think my 2009 model had HDMI but my current (2015) model doesn't have any dedicated video out port. I can't say I completely agree about requiring a dongle but I never hook it up to an external display anyway.
https://www.tomshardware.com/m... [tomshardware.com]
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
it's a JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) model. They have weird stuff you don't see anymore, like small round trackpads. it's also early-2000s thick-and-boxy.
they also (used to) have features you wouldn't even imagine. For example, a reader for transit cards (SUICA for example). In japan, the I.C. Cards (train and bus cards) are used as wallets. Thousands of shops (especially around train stations) and vending machines support payment with this sort of cards. And they made laptops with readers for these, for online shopping.
Re: I don't get it. (Score:2)
To be fair to the Japanese a lot of these older technologies were far more advanced than what we had when they were first released, which might explain why they have lasted so long. Back when we were still using SMS and CAD on phones they already have camera phones and high speed mobile Internet. Similarly, using their equivalent of an Oyster Card (a prepaid RFID card used to pay for public transport in London) to pay for things predates the contactless payment methods we used today. By a lot.
Weren't the Ja
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Bizarrely, it seems a lot of legal and government offices in the US still accept a FAXed copy of an original, but not a scanned/emailed one.
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Yes, but, I had heard "Japan is living in the year 2000 since 1980", and when I traveled to Japan, I confirmed it.
At this point, it's almost retro-futuristic. Everything new is modern, but... early 2000s modern at best.
And a lot of japanese honestly believe they are still living in the future, compared to the rest of the world.
The japanese still use fax. You can buy new fax machines at most electronics stores, though admittedly, it's not really another appliance at home like it used to be.
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I think they're still using faxes for legal purposes even today in Japan.
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they also (used to) have features you wouldn't even imagine. For example, a reader for transit cards (SUICA for example).
This looks to just be a NFC device? I can imagine a laptop with NFC pretty easily. I've owned multiple laptops with smartcard slots, NFC doesn't even require a slot.
Re: I don't get it. (Score:2)
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Let's Note are known as Toughbooks outside Japan. The range covers business oriented by still fairly rugged machines, to industrial designs that are extremely durable. I have an older Let's Note and the lid claims to be able to take 100kg, in case you accidentally sit on it.
As no-nonsense machines they only dropped optical drives a few years ago, and tend to come with a lot of legacy ports, an ethernet jack, and an unusual round trackpad. You can sort of wind your finger around the trackpad to scroll, and i
VGA (Score:2)
More like... (Score:3)
The real news (Score:3)
Eh, on laptops maybe. (Score:1)
Apple hasn't made a laptop with a VGA port since 2012, it looks like... but Dell PowerEdge and Precision rackmounts intended for datacenter use still have 'em. Gotta connect your stuff to KVMs somehow.
The business projector to business laptop cycle. (Score:2)
So get an HDMI to VGA adapter (Score:1)
They're cheap. They even have a socket for an audio jack.
You still want VGA and serial? Spare us. (Score:3)
How about parallel and PS/2? Perhaps SCSI too?
Oh, I bet you want an AM radio, aux in, and a CD player in your new car, too. And it should be able to handle leaded gas!
And why, oh why, does this hotel not have a stable for my horse?
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And why, oh why, does this hotel not have a stable for my horse?
The tech related one here is the phone port for plugging your laptop's PCMCIA modem into.
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Horses are tech. I learned this from the tech tree in Civilization.
Otherwise monkeys would be on horseback, and that's just fucking silly:
https://people.com/thmb/mEiK9o... [people.com]
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AM radio is still useful, even if not commonly used. It has the greatest broadcast area per watt of transmission power.
Aux-in is merely an auxiliary port where you can pipe whatever you want into your sound system. This represents Freedom.
The only item you mentioned that deserves derision is the CD player.
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The only item you mentioned that deserves derision is the CD player.
What if you want to listen to music or an audiobook that isn't on the radio and isn't being streamed? You might be able to play music from a thumb drive or something, but in many cases you would still need to get the original music from a CD.
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Interestingly, I still use the CD player in one of my cars, as I have an old MP3 CD in there. The USB port was broken when I got the car, so I set up the CD, and by the time the dealer fixed the USB port, I had no need to set up a USB stick. Aux? Never used it in any car. AM? Only used it when I accidentally hit the wrong button.
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Last I heard, some gamers were still using PS/2 input devices on the premise that they are interrupt-based. As far as I know this is still valid reasoning if your goal is to fetishistically reduce latency unless your input devices are USB2 or higher, or your PS/2 ports are secretly hanging off of a USB bus anyway - is anyone doing this yet, aside from for external dongles?
2005 (Score:2)
Is it 2005 again already?
Thick (Score:1)
I think the real issue is how thick a VGA connector is, compared to an HDMI connector - everyone wants thin laptops these days.
_Beginning_ of the end? (Score:2)
More like the end of the end for VGA on laptops. There can't be many other models which still have VGA. As others have mentioned, there have been at least three generations of video outputs since then.
In other news, the ThinkPad my company just bought me finally got rid of the in-keyboard joystick and went with a large, buttonless trackpad.
Amusing (Score:2)
I thought DisplayPort over USB-C was the new hotness, but they're just learning about HDMI? Color me amused.