MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Setting Up a Remote DVD Drive

MacBook Air’s unofficial title as the world’s lightest notebook computer is the result of a lot of hard, creative work on the part of Apple and its partners (including Intel, which built a tiny processor just for MacBook Air). However, that claim to lightweight fame is also the result of quite a few compromises, like not having FireWire or Ethernet ports.

Perhaps the most controversial omission is MacBook Air’s lack of a DVD drive. This seems like a huge problem at first, but you probably find that, as you use MacBook Air from day to day, the absence of an optical drive becomes less noticeable. You can always transfer files over a wireless network or via a USB flash drive and, quite often, you can download applications from the App Store or the Internet.

However, there will be times when what you need is on a disc: a device driver, an application, data, and so on. One way to work around this problem is to attach an external DVD drive to one of the MacBook Air’s USB ports. A good example is the MacBook Air SuperDrive, shown in Figure 2.3.

2.3 If a disc contains otherwise unobtainable data, you can attach a MacBook Air SuperDrive to the MacBook Air USB port.

No external drive in sight? Okay, you have another option: Get another computer to share its DVD drive over the network. You could then access the remote drive and use it as though it was a local ...