Why do Mobos still have Parallel ports?

It's one of those things that, as soon as you take them off the board, people ask "Why did they get rid of the Parallel port?" If there's another feature that people want, that replaces that space on the board, but it seems to me they are able to fit everything onto the panel that is needed, while keeping legacy support. Take for instance the mobo's that have the Toslink, and Analog Audio ports on them, while keeping the 4+ USB, 7.1 Audio, serial, mouse, keyboard, etc. You'd be surprised how many people *Aren't* using a motherboard that's newer than 2 years old, and still have printer's that work with the only connection being a parellal port.

The simple answer is 1 mobo company would include them and get all the sales from those who need the extra's. The mobo would also get its market share and gain this extra from the other mobo makers. Its marketing 101 with a little PC logic.

The major reason for these controlling sales are the high priced older tech items that need them. If you had a $10000 color laser printer that needed a Parallel port what would you buy?

The major part of microcontrollers/processors programmers and emulators works on LPT or COM ports only, and many of them require a TRUE physical port and don't work with an USB adapter.
And quite all the banking automation machines, bar code readers, POS terminals and such devices (even the most modern ones) require true serial ports.
The USB bus is not simple to manage as the serial port, it requires a specific protocol, drivers and, most of all, even if it has a much higher bandwidth it's absolutely not realtime and has very high latency!
On USB bus every device is a slave, it can't initiate a data transfer by itself, it's the host PC that asks it at fixed intervals if it has some data to send.
These queries for new data are performed every 1ms multiplied by the number of the USB devices connected to the host: if you have 4 devices it takes up to 4ms for a device to initiate a data transfer (yes, 4ms latency!) while a 115200bps COM port has a maximum latency of 10us... 400 times less! And, on buffered systems like the linux/windows serial drivers a serial device can initiate a data transfer at any time, without requiring any acknolwdge from the host PC.

Also, many older applications required parallel ports for security dongles. Autodesk used them for a while and I still run into folks using the dongles on old unix boxes that haven't been turned off for 15 years running old business management software. As for serial ports, I curse whoever decided to stop putting these on laptops. I recently purchased a new laptop and sent it back right after I opened the box and noticed the lack of serial ports. I didn't even unwrap the plastic. RS-232 ports are probably the most widely used config ports in existence.

Have you ever tried to connect to the console port of an enterprise class router? Most of them use serial ports, not to mention an additional serial port to connect a modem to in case the network goes down and remote dial-up is your last resort of communication.

Why should I buy a new laser printer?

backwards compadibility... gotta love it

Noooo Noooo not my PS/2 connector !!! (I like PS/2 Mice better then USB) lol I imagine one day I shall be forced to use a USB mouse....

I dont know man I just recently went to a wireless AND Optical mouse... lol I guess on certain things I dont like change (I held out against a wheel mouse for like 2 years but Unreal Tournament finaly convinced me to give it a whirl and wow it did play better then using the numbers to select a weapon !!!)