MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Exchanging Files Wirelessly with AirDrop

If you want to exchange a file between MacBook Air and another Mac, you have several ways to go about it:

You can join both Macs to an existing infrastructure wireless network that uses a wireless router as the connection point.

You can create and then join both Macs to an ad hoc wireless network that doesn’t use a router.

You can activate Bluetooth Sharing on both Macs, as described later in this chapter, and use the Bluetooth File Exchange utility.

All these methods work well enough, but they have their drawbacks. Infrastructure wireless networks require a router; ad hoc networks require (optionally, but importantly) the exchange of a network password; and Bluetooth file exchanges are fairly complicated to set up and can be quite slow.

None of these drawbacks is a deal-breaker in most situations, but you can easily think of times when a simple, fast way of sharing a file would be handy; for example, if you meet a friend at a coffee shop or a colleague at a conference. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just somehow “beam” a file from your MacBook Air to the other person’s Mac (and vice versa)?

I’m happy to report that this glorious day is ...