this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Apple still puts form over function - even the current magic mouse is more of a tabletop decoration than a functional input device. They just learned how to get away with it.
Is the charging port still on the bottom? Lol I remember seeing pictures of that shit. What a joke.
Overheard in the UX department at work: ".. yeah, but I can't right now, my mouse is charging".
Yes. But don't worry the next one will probably be Qi charger only so the mouse ~~becomes unusable for longer~~ won't have filty ports spoiling it's aesthetics.
I remember in the CD/DVD-ROM days, when you had to boot up the OS to eject the tray, because Apple didn't want any buttons on the case.
I've had a disdain for that company, and Jobs, for more than 30 years, ever since I read how the latter forced the engineers mount capacitors on the flip side of the motherboard, because he felt they looked ugly when peering inside the cabinet. The result was increased complexity and overheating issues.
They had a legitimate argument in the floppy era, I think.
The Windows PC had a mechanical eject button on floppy drives, which the OS had no control over. You could corrupt a filesystem by deciding to eject a disk at the wrong time, if the OS decided to start writing to the floppy then. To this day, that's how 3.5" floppy drives work on Windows PCs.
Apple said
in my view, correctly
"okay, this is a disaster'. They built their computers without an eject button on the floppy drive. Their floppy drives had a motor to let the OS eject the disk, You had to ask the OS to eject a disk, and the OS would only do so when it knew that it wasn't going to be writing to the disk. They had a pinhole through which you could push a mechanical eject button if something went wrong with the OS. That was a good call, I think. It did mean that unless you were going to use the pinhole, the drive had to be at least powered.
By the optical disc era, though, the Windows side of things had fixed things up. What you had was a system where drives had a non-mechanical eject button. The drive had two states that it could be in
the OS could ask the drive to be in a "locked" or "unlocked" state. In an "unlocked" state, the button would activate the motor to do the ejection. In a "locked" state, it wouldn't, but the OS would receive a message from the drive, and as long as it was functioning, could unmount the thing and eject the CD.
Good write up.
I might be misremembering this, but I think the external drive I had for my Amiga 500 had hardware lockout, i.e. one couldn't eject a disk while the drive was working. I recall it as the button being locked/couldn't be pressed. If I'm not just remembering wrong, it would mean there were options to hinder erroneous disk ejects beyond removing the button.