Apple designers have removed the physical eject button and incorporated the eject function into the Mac and the operating system itself, allowing you to use various methods of ejecting an optical disc without having to fiddle with any buttons or in the worse case a paperclip to access the emergency eject hole. Most of the methods for ejecting a disc are software based and one of them may be able to help you dislodge a stubborn optical disc. You can also use Terminal to specify an internal or external optical drive as the target for the eject command. The other advantage of Terminal is that unlike some of the other eject options for getting a stuck disc ejected, Terminal does not require you to shutdown and restart your Mac. In most cases when you choose to eject a disc in a slot loading optical drive, your Mac first checks to see if the drive actually has a disc inserted. If it thinks there is no disc present, it will not perform the eject command. If this happens to you, you can use this nifty trick involving the Boot Manager to easily force optical media to be ejected. And because the command is always available from the menu bar, you can always access this command, no matter how many windows and apps are cluttering up your desktop… The optical drives in a Mac lack these two basic features, or if they’re present, they’re carefully hidden away by Apple’s designers, in order to ensure a uniform look to the Mac. In other words, a case of design trumping function. While the designers were willing to turn a blind eye to the problem of ejecting a stuck disc, the electrical and mechanical engineers provided alternate methods of getting a stuck CD or DVD disc out of a Mac’s optical drive.
