Mac Gripe: the CD/DVD drive

I love my Mac.  I hate the CD drive in my Mac.  I’ve hated all the CD drives in the Macs for a while.  What I can’t stand about them is the lack of a physical manual eject capability.  Others have had this complaint.  I don’t know why Apple did this thing, but they did it a while ago, and they continue with it.  It’s the conversion of the Mac to a little CD/DVD ATM machine.  You put the thing in, and if it isn’t quite the right thing, you really can’t be sure you are going to get it back, and once it’s in there, the drive is useless to you.

I have two scenarios that I’ve run into that really ticked me off.  Most recently was about an hour ago, when I was trying to dredge up some old data and I found a CD that might have the archived bits I wanted on it.  So I stuck the thing in the drive to see what was on it, and it spun up and spun down and *gulp* that was it.  Now, I admit I did something dumb here:  I tried to cajole the drive.  I had a Windows VM running, so I told VMWare to mount the physical CD drive.  So that took out VMWare, and the VM was shutdown unfavorably, so I lost a bunch of state that’s a pain to put back together.  Like I said, that was probably dumb.  So I end up using the most common fix for this, which is to power down my Mac, and power it back up with the mouse button held down (no drutil didn’t work - nothing worked).  In my opinion, that’s a piss poor thing to make a user do to eject a CD that the drivers get their various bits in a bunch about.  Drill me a hole for that old fashioned paperclip, please.  FYI, once I got that CD out, I took it down to my Dell laptop, and stuck it in there, and it read the bits just fine, so the CD isn’t some piece of radioactive toxic waste, that’s for sure.

So, the second case, which goes a little further back in time to late last year, had to do with my Mac Mini.  This was a personal machine that my family used.  It died a hard death (logic board failure).  But there was a CD in it, and I wanted it back.  With the logic board gone, it wouldn’t boot to any point at all, even off an external device where it could be forced to eject the CD.  So how do you suppose you have to go about getting that CD back?  You have to dismantle the Mac mini, INCLUDING THE CD DRIVE.  You actually have to physically unscrew a ton of screws on the drive to get the cover off!  Getting to those screws is no picnic, either, because the CD drive is mounted on the top of the machine, and the cover comes off the bottom, so you have to dismantle the bulk of the machine before you get to the drive.  I asked the guys at the Genius Bar about this, and they said that was basically the only way, too.

I’m sure Apple had a really good reason for doing this, but in my opinion, IT WASN"T GOOD ENOUGH!

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Posted by Eli Boling on February 19th, 2010 under OS X, Uncategorized |