I do most of my writing on a big old wooden desk in my office. Crammed into the top left hand side drawer of my desk is a dizzying array of cables, dongles, converters, and other technological bric-a-brac that one naturally accumulates over the course of owning electronics. Just the other day I was pawing through a tangle of wires and I thought, 'You know what the world needs? Yet another standard connector so we can all buy adaptors that, invariably, will end up at the bottom of our techno-heap.'

Enter DisplayPort. You may have heard of DisplayPort thanks to Apple's recent announcement that they are abandoning DVI, a more traditional way of connecting a monitor to a computer, in favor of DisplayPort for their new MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup (Mini DisplayPort pictured, right). Apple isn't the only computer maker to hitch their wagon to the DisplayPort's rising star, though — a host of companies that you know, including HP, Lenovo, and Dell, are also adding DisplayPorts to their products (including desktops, laptops, and monitors to attach them to).

What is DisplayPort, and why should you care? Don't feel too bad if you aren't aware of what DisplayPort is because at the moment you can't buy too many computers that support it. The computer industry faced a challenge: more and more people were buying flat screen monitors for their computers and wanted to hook them up simply and with a crystal clear picture. Old monitors used a connection called VGA, which is an analog connection. To get the picture from your computer to the monitor required a conversion from a digital signal (the output of the computer) to analog (which is what VGA uses to transmit the image to the monitor screen). Along with that conversion comes an inevitable image quality degradation. This didn't pose too much of a problem before the dawn of cheap and plentiful HD video, but you and I are much pickier about our video quality now. We want it all, and we want it in HD, darn it!

HDMI, which is found on HDTVs and stereo receivers (pictured, left), offers up many of the benefits that computer makers sought: the port is smaller (making it easier to fit on laptops), it can handle transmitting both audio and video signals (less cables), and it has a low licensing fee and per device royalty associated with its use. Yes, a manufacturer of electronics that uses HDMI, let's say Sony, has to pay the HDMI Licensing Consortium a yearly flat fee for use of the HDMI spec, as well as four cents for every individual device that includes an HDMI port. When you're shipping millions of laptops, desktops, monitors, and projectors that four cents adds up quickly.

The HDMI licensing fee wasn't very appealing to the computer industry, and there were a few other things about HDMI that just weren't ideal for use with computers, especially laptops. The power requirements for a piece of equipment that remains stationary are very different from those of a laptop. Whatever the new standard was going to be, it needed to be cheap and use a small amount of power.

This is a long way of getting to the advent of DisplayPort (pictured, right). DisplayPort is small (about the size of a USB port, which is much smaller than a DVI port), it uses little power, and it is capable of transmitting video, audio, and other signals over one cable (Apple's DisplayPort-enabled LED Cinema Display uses the DisplayPort to transmit video, audio, and information from a built-in webcam). Additionally — and this is the good part for all you dongle fans out there — DVI monitors can be hooked up to computers with DisplayPort via the use of an adaptor. DisplayPort and HDMI are also so closely related that you don't even need an adaptor to hook them up with one another: just a simple cable with a DisplayPort connector on one end, and an HDMI connector on the other.

Sadly, DisplayPort to VGA is a little more complicated (you knew it had to be too good to be true). Since VGA is analog based, and DisplayPort is all digital all the time, in order to use your DisplayPort sportin' computer with your old VGA monitor you need to buy a converter that will translate the signal between the two. Since there is actual processing involved with this translation these converters cost more than the relatively simple adaptors.

In the long run DisplayPort should be a win for both computer users and computer makers. The computer companies save on the fees since DisplayPort is free to use and we, the lowly users, will be able to get rid of that tangled mess of wires in our desk drawers when we get DisplayPort monitors and computers equipped with DisplayPort. Until that time it might be a good idea to stock up on adaptors because few things are worse then finding out that your laptop can't be hooked up to a DisplayPort projector moments before you're supposed to present the quarterly figures in front of your boss.