What is on Your Mind?

I thought I post about a small irritation that I have been having for years, in fact ever since CDs came out, which is a good 25 years now. For some reason, CD player manufacturers do not design their tray to come out completely and leaving about 1cm or 2cms of the tray in the system, so that it is necessary to make a sort of bending / slicing wrist movement in order to insert or take out the CD. Almost all manufacturers design their players that way. Why?

My slimline tray on both laptops come out all the way on rails, but regular drives for desktops seem to tend to rely on the tray itself to provide support so I guess part of it has to stay "inside" to hold up the tray. I find it irritating too.

There were some auto loading CD drives available that did not have a tray, but just a slot that you slid the CD part way into, and then the drive completed the loading process. Similar to many cartridge tape drives. I guess they were too expensive to manufacture.

The cost argument makes sense, but the surprising part is that hardware reviewers hardly ever mention this.

Tray loaders couldn't operate with half-size CD's, so weren't popular.

I think those CD trays used to have a double ring for that purpose.

Edit: Example



Also, don't you find irritating that most laptop CD drives pop the tray just a little and then you have to slide it with your fingers in order to fully open it?

Not really, given that the motor and mechanics for opening and closing, and sensors for checking for obstructions (eg. a badly placed disk) would take up precious space in an laptop.