Ejecting Discs The Mac Way [Update]
Eject
I criticize because I love.
Yesterday, I discussed functional design with my better half (read: girlfriend) while driving home from IKEA. She uses Mac at work and mentioned how a new colleague who was used to The PC Way had trouble ejecting a disc on her new Intel Mac Pro Quad Xeon.
A little back story: On most PCs, consumer devices such as DVD players, CD players and other disc handling devices, there’s an “eject” button next to the tray / slot-loading mechanism. On the Mac, however, there isn’t. The Mac Way of ejecting discs is threefold: you can drag the disc into the virtual trash bin1, you can press the “Eject” button on the keyboard (top right corner), or you can press the “Eject” button next to the disc in the Finder device list (the Mac file explorer).
Now Apple makes beautiful and functional hardware. Whenever someone asks me what laptop they should buy, I say “buy a Mac”. I say this because they’re functional pieces of work. Except of course, for the mystery of the missing Eject button. Can someone please explain, using puppets if necessary, why Apple hasn’t included an eject button next to disc trays yet! To me this seems like another doomed-to-fail Apple crusade like the decade-long lack of right-click mice.
[Update]: Okay fine, so an eject button might not make so much sense on a Mac laptop, but I stand by what I said with regards to the non-portable macs, mainly for the reasons Brian mentions.
- In addition, the trash bin turns into an eject icon, when volumes are dragged over it ↑
The comment above this one by Dave Child described my exact sentiments.
Dave, I couldn’t agree more on your statement if we shared the same brain.
It might be a bit deeper that just style or looks, eg linux would lock the cd rom once the drive was mounted, makes sense so the os doesn’t panic if you open the cd tray whilst the os thinks it has a logical files system connected.
I checked my mac pro (my first mac too!) and yer if all else fails there is provision to use a paper clip (not a silly virtual one) to manually extract the media.
no button, it’s different but it’s the same for network, memory devices and cd/dvd etc so it’s consistent.
looks, I like it with out an eject button.
my 2 bobs worth ;o)
Robert
Guys doesn’t xp do the same as Mac OSX because when the cd has been written the cd or dvd is ejected automacatlly so xp is no different to Mac OSX,I know this as my mechine ejects cds dvds execpt for floppys as soon as they are written
Read this one, you’ll know why:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=876627
Different products are designed differently ok!
Mercedes Cars have knobs on the doors to unlock them, Peugeot cars on the other hand have a button kinda thing on the door handle that you use to unlock. No one bitches about those differences, accept the difference in products OK we dont want to have all manufacturers making the same bloody thing…