How to Add or Remove Eject Icon From the macOS Menu Bar

Apple no longer sells any Mac with a built-in optical drive, but many users still rely on CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs for both work and entertainment. And since Apple also doesn’t put eject keys on their keyboards, it’s handy for these users to have an eject icon in their macOS menu bar.
The menu bar eject icon has one simple purpose: to send an eject command to a connected compatible optical drive. This is especially important for those using optical drives that don’t have physical eject buttons, such as the Apple SuperDrive.

Now, what should happen is if you connect a compatible optical drive to your Mac, macOS will detect that and add automatically add the eject icon to your menu bar. Unfortunately, lots of users (including us) find that this process doesn’t always work as it should. In that case, here’s how you can manually add the eject icon to your menu bar, even if you don’t have an optical drive connected.

Add Eject Icon to Menu Bar

1. From the macOS desktop, make sure Finder is the active application and then select Go > Go to Folder from the menu bar. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-G
2. Enter the following location: /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/
3. Find and double-click on Eject.menu

This will immediately add the eject icon to your menu bar. Click on it to see which optical drive it detects and you can then click on the desired disc to eject it. As mentioned, this works even if you don’t currently have an optical drive connected, in which case clicking on the eject icon will report No Drives.

Remove Eject Icon from Menu Bar

If you want to remove the eject icon later, or if you don’t know how it got there in the first place, you can rearrange or remove it via the same method as any other menu bar icon.

Simply hold the Command key on your keyboard and click and hold on the eject icon. You can either drag it left or right to reposition it, or drag it down and off the menu bar until you see a small “x” icon appear. At this point, just release the mouse button and it will remove the eject icon from your menu bar.