MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Connecting MacBook Air to Another Mac

If you have another Mac kicking around, it’s natural to want to share things between that Mac and your MacBook Air: documents, Safari bookmarks, iTunes libraries, downloads, and more. The standard way of sharing data between computers is to create a network. However, that requires a central connection point for the computers, usually a router. If you don’t have such networking hardware handy (for example, you’re in a hotel room or on a plane), you might think that sharing is off the table, but that’s not true. There are actually several ways that you can connect two Macs directly: with a Thunderbolt cable, with a network (or crossover) cable, or by creating an ad hoc wireless network. The next two sections provide the Thunderbolt and network cable details; see Chapter 2 to learn about creating an ad hoc wireless network.

Connecting to another Mac using a Thunderbolt cable

If you have a fourth- or fifth-generation MacBook Air and you just happen to have a Thunderbolt cable lying around, that’s great because you can use it to connect MacBook Air and another Mac via their Thunderbolt ports and share files between them. I’m assuming here, of course, that the other Mac also comes with a Thunderbolt port (as almost all recent Macs do; the one exception is the Mac Pro).

Besides connecting the two Macs using the Thunderbolt cable, you also have to make sure that your Macs are configured to share files. Follow these steps:

1. Click System Preferences ...