At 1%

What did dude think was coming out of the VGA port? Tiny photographs? It's all electricity through wires, of course it'll send some electricity into a phone

It's sending out the pixels, silly! A stream of little pixels in neat little rows.
Yeah but is the voltage correct? It should be 5V to charge a phone over USB, is that part of the VGA spec?
- With USB power delivery, you can get 9V, 12V or higher over USB. Usually the device requests higher voltage from a PD charger, but it's not impossible for a modern device to be able to cope with just having 12V shoved into it.
- Doesn't matter. The VGA to HDMI adapter is active, not passive, so it matters if HDMI has a 5v rail, not VGA
- Yeah I don't think there's a 5V pin for VGA.
  I think if we had the scenario where we had a higher voltage than needed, we could have a toasty voltage regulator making something happen, but going the other way would need boost circuitry unlikely to exist in these parts, in my understanding
I don't know shit about cables but it's plugged into a monitor. My intuition is that a monitor shouldn't be pushing power out through a video input port.
- DisplayPort has a +3.3V 500mA pin specifically for pushing power. In theory, great for powering an active adapter. In practice, has killed motherboards because Dell can't design a computer for shit.
- The monitor has to send some data to the computer to tell it what screen resolutions it accepts. VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort will all do that for sure. Less certain about component, composite, and S-Video.
- Pin 9 on VGA is 5V out.
- Signals aren't magic, they consist of electrical power. You can get at least a little bit of power from anything that isn't an optical port.
Of course electricity comes out of a VGA port, but it's only a signal, I wouldn't assume that it's anywhere near enough to charge a phone.
- Pin #9 of the VGA spec is 5v, though it seems unusual that a monitor would provide power on that pin
The VGA port on a monitor is an input.

Relevant xkcd

At this point, I’m more impressed that there’s always someone ready to share the relevant xkcd, than I am that there happens to be a relevant xkcd for everything.

IF the phone can output enough power with it's OTG port AND has the correct drivers for that cheap-ass looking USB framebuffer graphics thing AND that's an active HDMI to VGA adapter rather than some shitty vendor-specific implementation based on some unholy bastardisation AND the phone supports external displays... then I still don't think it'd work, tbh (but it won't (it might though (it won't))).

Society if VGA over MicroUSB was standardized

yeah? well I have a
wall outlet › USB-A › Micro USB › USB-C › THC
adapter, how about that? (it just ends in my rechargeable cart)

wall outlet › USB-A › Micro USB › USB-C › THC
You convert electricity into tetrahydrocannabinol, the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis?
Neat!
- MicroUSB does it with MHL, which is the less addictive one
You get high from a wall outlet? Cool!
You can convert USB-A directly into THC!? Since when!? I'm about to get so fucking high, I've got a drawer full of those old cables.

The micro is probably charge only, no data. So no signal.

Yup. VGA - HDMI and HDMI - USB should be working as intended. I have a HDMI - USB-c for my tablet's second monitor that works just fine.
Even with a data-capable cable I don't think most microUSB ports have video output capabilities. You'd have to find a cable/adapter specifically designed for video out, and a device with the explicit capability (usually cameras and phones).

If you had an old HTC windows ce 6.0 it might work. Like the HTC tilt 2.

Pretty sure those were mini USB.
- Just need another adapter.
- Might be, I misplaced mine and I've been looking for it.

My old tower pc used to give wicked electric shocks off the hdmi ports. Pretty sure I could have run space heaters off those fuckers

This pissed me off so much that I accidentally backed out and up voted a post I didn't even look at. Fuck you, sir.

Mission accomplished

Am I in the minority of people who never used VGA?

Emphasis on Minor I guess
- The only time I've encountered VGA was my first year as an intern, my office had given me a 4:3 flat screen monitor which frequently gave me migraines. Thing had to be older than me. That was 7 years ago.
  If I encountered it before that, I wasn't aware of it because I was a child and wasn't responsible for plugging in the monitors I was using.
What did you use then? I remember cheap monitors in the early 00s ONLY having VGA. By the time I'd moved on, HDMI was so ubiquitous, I skipped DVI instead.
- Very legitimate possiblity OP was born in the early 00's
- If you were rich enough, could have only used displays with RGB-BNC.
  Or maybe they're kinda crazy and used Component video with a TV screen. (Or composite...)
  Or maybe they're just not that old.
- Monitors at Walmart still have VGA available, so someone must be using it.
  Also a bit weird in that they have a “modern” set of just VGA/HDMI, as a monitor of the period would have DVI, too. Think DVI wasn’t ever really a thing except for power users though.
I used VGA up until maybe 2012, 2013. Even longer at my job.
- Thats cute. There are so, so many machines that have vga still in my field.
  Basically every hmi panel in existence use vga still. And password-less vnc.
I remember when CGA and EGA were normal and then this fancy new VGA came out but only on fancy high end computers and monitors.
VGA was still very common around 20 years ago.
It used to be that a monitor was fancy if it had DVI and really fancy if it had HDMI