To get it to work, launch Terminal.app, which will pop up a window where you type in commands rather than click and drag. It’s a nice, sleek external drive and last I checked, you can pick one up on eBay for about $50 on eBay. You’ll need your system administrator password and some level of comfort working on the command line in Terminal.app (which can be found in Applications -> Utilities).įirst off, here’s a pic of the MacBook Air Superdrive, so we can be sure we’re on the same page before we start: You’re on your own if you get this to work with one of those (but I imagine it’ll work just fine: if you do test it with good results perhaps you can post a comment letting us know?) But it just ain’t so…įixing it turns out to be easy, but it involves a bit of a hack to the Mac OS X operating system itself, and while I’ve tested it out on Lion, I haven’t tried it on Leopard, Snow Leopard or OS X Mountain Lion.
For everything else it just acts as if it’s not plugged in or that the USB plug itself is damaged and non-functional. Turns out that it should work just fine with any Mac system, but that there’s a little switch in the operating system itself that only lets the drive work on the MacBook Air and - as it turns out - certain models of the Mac Mini. This is an interesting situation because you’re right to be suspicious of how the Apple external USB Superdrive is completely dead when plugged into your MacBook Pro.
