If you plug in a CD drive (he said with a straight face in the lord’s year 2026), and then eject too soon, the system offers this dialog, which allows you to say: Eject whenever you’re done with whatever you have to do.

But more modern media, like SSD drives, don’t show that window. The best case scenario is that you get a dialog box like the 1990s never ended:

It gets worse. Often, you get zero help in identifying what the “programs” actually are. (The word on the street is that it might be stuff like Spotlight indexing, which you can’t really control.)

More often than not I just click Force Eject or jank the drive cable out, which feels really unpleasant. I would guess many people do the same.

So at this point we are two steps worse than the original CD experience, which… wasn’t even that great! A pretty clear improvement on this already exists elsewhere in macOS, and could be reused here – “hey, you don’t have to do anything, just give me a second while I finish up here.”

(Can’t help but notice the discrepancy of visual styles of these windows, and even the inconsistency between calling things “applications” vs. “programs.”)

Reported to Apple as FB21787458.