This is what I recall hearing. Much like clicking the “Safely Remove Hardware” thing for USB drives on PCs, the point was to avoid removing disks that the computer was still using. Or it could just be that Steve Jobs wanted it that way.
No, they don’t. If the disc won’t eject you have to dismantle the optical drive to get it out.
Here’s some instructions on removing a stuck disc from a Mac Mini.
Windows 7 is just as capable of locking an optical drive if it needs to (such as when burning a disc). But in almost every other case,removing a disc has no I’ll effect on the OS (except for the occasional "insert disc - abort/retry/ignore where no matter WHAT you pick,itll keep asking over and over). In fact,the one and only time Win7 EVER locks up for me is when I try to read from a scratched disc,which is also a time when the eject button is disabled.
One thing I thought was crazy about those early Macs was that to eject a disk, you dragged the icon to the trash, which is the same thing you did in order to delete something. It seemed to me a very bad idea to make the “eject” and “delete” gestures the same.
If you used the menus or keystrokes to eject the disk, the disk stayed greyed out on the desktop, and the computer would periodically ask for it back. If you walked away from it, the next person to use the computer would get stuck in the “give me that other guy’s disk back!” loop.
Now, they’ve gotten rid of the requirement to drag the external device to the trash. You can hit the eject icon in the finder window pane or use the right click on the mouse.
Getting rid of the paper-clip hole is one of the two worst things about later-day Macs. The other worst thing is having a power button that’s flush with the surface. Most people’s Macs are down on the floor, under the working surface. It’s dark down there. If you need to hit the power button, you can’t feel where it is; you need to get a flashlight so you can see the little area that’s a little shinier than the mesh surrounding it. This is progress?
Well there’s your problem, your Mac box should be in a well lit, central, easily viewable location to celebrate its beauty! You don’t put a Picasso in a powder room. /Mac Apologist
Isn’t Apple phasing out the separate CPU box? The ones I see in the store are all integrated into the monitor.
The high-end stuff (MacPros) are all separate CPU boxes. I don’t know of any plans to phase those out of the high-end models., but I don’t keep close tabs on Apples (despite being a Mac user myself.)
What does “integrated into the monitor” mean?
Meaning that the computer has only three physical components – a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor. There’s no separate box or tower.
Here is an iMac: http://xtreview.com/images/imac-full-front-20inch.jpg
The monitor is also the CPU. The CD drive is on the edge to the right of the screen and the power up button is on the lower left, on the back.
Apple sells “Pro” machines that are towers, with (no monitor). They also sell the Mac Mini, which is a compact machine, also with no monitor.
Jesus H. Christ, what a serious collection of fundamental ignorance. It’s like complaining that all these new-fangled cars don’t have crank starts below the radiator.
There are several ways to force a modern Mac to eject a disc. If the system is completely non-responsive to either keyboard or mouse input, you have larger problems than not being able to eject a disc. Jobs has made no secret of the fact that the corporate philosophy of Apple is to regard physical magnetic and optical media to be obsolescent at best. Apple led the computing world in eliminating portable magnetic media, and with solid state media exceeding the capacity of even Blu-Ray discs it is only a matter of time before the personal computing world dispenses with the remaining moving devices in desktop and laptop computers.
To answer the question of the o.p., Macs don’t have an eject button because such a button is generally needless, provides another failure point and intrusion into the chassis, and tray-type optical disc systems are far more prone to damage or failure than enclosed slot-type drives. The root cause of the complaint by the o.p. is adequately spelled out in his own words, to wit: “…I am totally NOT a Mac person.”
Of the multitude of complaints one could reasonable make about Apple, the Macintosh computing family, and OSX, this is probably both the weakest and yet the most prevalent. Go read Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual and come back with some real complaints about the default security configuration, the limitations of HFS+, and the limitations of the Quartz compositor (which is still a generational leap ahead of X11.org).
Stranger
Is it network transparent now, to the same extent X11 is?
(Also: X11 or X.org. X11 is the standard, X.org is the current most-used implementation. X11.org is like saying Automoford or something. ;))
Actually, all of the underlying slot-load drives I’ve seen do have eject buttons - it is just that there’s no hole in the computer case to access them!
Dell has also started doing this (Studio 155x, for example), and it is quite annoying.
Do you have any references for tray-load drives being less reliable than slot-load ones? With tray-load drives, the paper clip hole is a strictly mechanical interlock that releases the tray. On slot-load drives, both the on-drive eject button (which you can’t get to) and the keyboard eject button are “Mother may I?” buttons. The one on the drive will usually work unless the drive firmware has gotten in a tizzy trying to re-read a bad sector. The keyboard one requires the active participation of a mostly-working computer. I’ve had a number of slot-load drives have their eject mechanism fail. Usually they just emit a plaintive “shwip! shwip! shwip!” over and over as they try to eject the disc but fail. Despite slot-load being a newer concept than tray-load, I’ve seen far more slot-load drives fail that way than tray-load ones that fail to unlatch the tray when an eject is requested.
Regarding Windows not letting go of a disk even when the drive eject button is pressed, that can be from 2 things. The first is a drive firmware problem as described above. The second is that there is an intentional command, “Prevent/Allow media removal” which is a carry-over from SCSI (ATA optical drives implement ATAPI, which is more-or-less SCSI commands on an ATA bus). It is normally the application that requests the drive to be locked. If the application fails, or even “forgets” to unlock the drive, Windows has no way to know that the application is done with the drive.
BTW, I’ve had a good number of computers come in with reqests of “I don’t care if you have to destroy the drive or not, but I need my disc back”.
Mostly, but not completely true. The Lisa (aka Macintosh XL) had 5.25" “twiggy” drives with eject buttons. They were soft buttons, so you were still dependent on the OS recognizing the button press, closing files and then when it was done with the disk, the OS would trigger the eject mechanism. But they were buttons and they were at the drives, rather than anything done via the GUI.
Bad analogy.
The hand crank on a car takes up a gear on the gearbox. So a 5 speed car would become a 4 speed if a hand crank was to be installed. Also electric starters are very reliable and besides you can also push-start the car in an emergency.
If there was no other way to start a car and the crank didn’t reduce the number of available gears then every car today would still come equipped with a hand crank.
It’s frustrating when confounding customer experiences are brushed off, especially the most prevalent ones. Year after year, model after model.
Seems to me the objection here isn’t to Macs so much as it is to slot-loading optical drives.
(Some?) Macs have a hardware eject that can be triggered with a paperclip.
Other methods for ejecting a stuck disc are described here. If those methods don’t work, a hardware eject button wouldn’t either.
Apple is making enough money that this doesn’t matter to them. If they weren’t, they’d go back to the 1990s and start making whitebox-a-likes with some odd hardware and a funky OS preinstalled. They’d have to [del]kill[/del] oust Jobs again to do it, but if the money behind the company wants it the board is obligated to follow.
On the other hand, the world has changed since the 1990s. Who’s to say that if Apple released a new low-end whitebox Mac that looks and feels like something Dell might sell, it wouldn’t do well in this new market stuffed with iPods and iPads? Call it an ‘iTunes station’ or something and sell it to people who aren’t gamers but also aren’t interested in, or capable of buying, a full-fledged Jobs Job.
I guess the upshot is that Apple isn’t just a hardware company. Apple is a boutique high-end hardware company with a significant lifestyle branding approach. Their BMWs aren’t going to obsolete either a Chevy or a Cessna.