(At least it didn’t require a caddy, like my old Apple SCSI CD-ROM drives.) Pressing an actual button to eject a disc drawer, then carefully loading the disc - using that weird, round, crunchy-sounding thing in the middle that holds the disc in, which I haven’t seen since a Discman - felt positively ’90s.

I have only used self-loading, slot-based optical drives since about 2007, and rarely, at that. The real reason I am writing this review, however, is to relay the strange but delightful experience of loading a DVD into a disc drawer for the first time in years. But if it’s stashed in a cabinet most of the time, who cares. And it comes with a weird dual-headed USB cord that you don’t need with a Mac. The downside: It’s moderately ugly, in an AmazonBasics kind of way.

It works! And it’s $40 cheaper than Apple’s $75 USB SuperDrive. So I added the $35 AmazonBasics DVD drive to a recent order. The optical drive in my iMac is getting moody, and there have been a few times when I wished I’d had an external disc drive around to use with my MacBook Air.

Amazon mac dvd drive