Shouting Grounds

“When Apple introduced the MacBook Air, they detailed a new feature called “Remote Disc” which makes up for the lack of a standard optical drive in the MacBook Air. Remote Disc allows the MacBook Air to wirelessly use a PC or Mac optical drive as if it were its own. Included with this functionality is the ability for the MacBook Air to wirelessly boot off of a Remote Disc shared drive. This means that if your MacBook Air requires an emergency boot or fresh reinstall, it can be done without the $99 external SuperDrive.

This added functionality required changes in the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and is not presently available on other Macs.

…

Update: We’ve been told that Mac OS X 10.5.2 will bring wireless booting to all Macs. “

Now wireless booting via shared disk, I can use. I wonder what the limitations of the remote disc software will be regarding the amount of clients that can boot. Of course you take a slow medium like an optical disc, then add the lag of a networking framework, probably wouldn’t make sense. Hopefully the rumors about 10.5.2 enabling this feature on the rest of the macs are true, but I won’t be truly excited until they allow boot via a mounted hard drive. The old G5 needs a firewire drive to boot externally and it’d be nice to have some flexibility there, in case I hose the ports with another bunk Lacie disk.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Apple, Hardware, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.