Apple’s Remote Disc feature: What’s the deal?
- January 15th, 2008
- Read 2142 times
- 4 Comments
If you’re like me, you might have felt that Jobsy glossed over the Remote Disc feature while talking about the new MacBook Air. “It’s like having a drive in your MacBook except there’s no drive! Boom! Time to move onto the next item. Boom! Bam!”
Whoa-ho-hold it. How does it actually work? The silver-tongued Matt Hickey was able to pry some more info out of one of Apple’s product managers.
Apple’s site says that “Remote Disc lets you wirelessly use or ‘borrow’ the optical drive of a Mac or PC in the vicinity.” I assumed this meant over a network but I got hung up on the word “vicinity” and thought for a second that it might have something to do with Bluetooth. It doesn’t. It indeed works over your wireless network.
Okay great. So it works just like a regular drive, right? I’m just borrowing it. I ain’t tryin’ to hurt nobody, no how. I can put a DVD in my regular computer, plop down in the living room, and watch the movie on my MacBook, right? No, you can’t. It needs to be fully transferred first.
What about games? Can I play a game that needs to access the CD or DVD for copyright purposes and/or to load new levels as the game progresses? Again, no. It doesn’t work like that. You’d have to dump the entire disc onto your hard drive and then use some sort of disc drive emulator — not an overly easy proposition for most folks.
It basically works as a file transfer device. You can install software over a network but after that, you’d better not need to access the disc for anything else. If you do, you’ll have to buy the add-on DVD SuperDrive for $99.
MacBook Air - Wireless [Apple.com]
Andrew Ruess (Who am I?)
6 months ago
I was thinking about this too and glimpsed the genius behind the design decisions (genius if you are an Apple shareholder).
With no optical drive for movies, now you can use this really easy interface in iTunes to rent your movie over the web and watch it like that. The removal of the drive supports their business model of digital media-less content delivery.
I think for people that do not need their optical drive often and prize mobility above all else, this device will do well… I’m tempted to buy it. =P
And I don’t know the last time that I played a game on the Mac that makes you keep the CD inserted. They all tend to fully install to hard drive now, right?
reuben g
6 months ago
Hang on a minuit. This is a cutdown laptop, why the hell is the price so damn steep. Get a MacBook, cheaper better. 4hr battery/5hr. The iBook G4 was claimed to be 6hr by Apple and could last 4h30 to 5 at a stretch………. A DVD writer only uses power when it is being used……. why omit it! It is to persuade people to buy movies on itunes, and the cost of making the laptop is less the DVD drive. What happens if you need to burn a DVD/CD on the fly? What happens if you need to connect to a wired network?
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chris (Who am I?)
6 months ago
hi! where did you read that Remote Disc can’t play DVDs or CDs, etc? i can’t find any details specifying that it works at the file level, rather than the block level (macs mount DMG and ISO files easily, after all).
Doug Aamoth (Who am I?)
6 months ago
Hey Chris. This information came straight from the mouth of one of Apple’s product managers at Macworld. We specifically asked if you can watch a DVD from another computer’s drive and if you can play a game that needs to read the disc for loading and/or copy protection from another computer’s drive. The answer to both questions was “no”.