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MacBook Air Unboxing Photos and Wireless Booting

Wireless Booting in the .2 update = The fix for the terrible wireless problems A LOT of users are having with their machines.

When calling an Apple Tech, I swear they are reading off of print out stuck next to their screen:

"You must have the signal blocked, try moving the machine somewhere else."

"There is nothing else I can do for you."

"Thank you, and buy a Airport Extreme Base Station."
 
krye said:
Holy minimilistic packaging Batman!
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And the more I see it, the more I miss the old days when unpacking Apple gear meant plucking lots of goodies out of a box that was almost as expensive looking as the machine itself :) New iPods vs. Old iPods...

Though the iMac still had that fun to an extent. Mmm keyboard, mouse...
 
eenu said:
Personally i thought it was pretty obvious that it would wirelessly boot! How else do they expect you to clean install or access disk utility functions from the Leopard DVD!
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Well, it's actually the first device of this kind that can do such a thing.

Having purchased an ultracompact with no optical drive (the Eee, which admittedly is quite a lot less expensive and also 50% smaller again), this kind of feature would be an absolute lifesaver. I haven't really had to boot my Macs off DVD very often, but it does happen. The Eee, on which I was experimenting with various shades of Linux, needed it more often, since I fracked it up more than once (what I did for the Eee is just reformat a 4GB USB drive so that one gig is taken up by a persistent live Ubuntu boot disk, which solves the problem handily, as I can still use the other three gigs -- but were I still on the original OS, for which a live ISO does not exist, I would need a windows PC with a DVD player to write a recovery USB).

This is a really nice engineering addition. It's one of those "only Apple would bother to actually do it" features. A very elegant solution. And a very tempting notebook, although I am sold on my Eee experiment for at least one year.
 
Update: We've been told that Mac OS X 10.5.2 will bring wireless booting to all Macs.
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How exactly would that work? Booting is handled by the firmware. So it must include a firmware update. Also, it would not work for PowerPC Macs because they don't have EFI.
 
imwoblin said:
I think all the Apple demo Macbook Air's had the solid state drives in them. At least that is what I was told at Macworld.
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None of the units at Macworld had SSD's in them. I don't know who told you that but it was untrue.

I'm quite certain that the reason these machines are shipping in two weeks is due to the fact that Apple is having trouble with the SSD, but that's just a hunch.
 
cohibadad said:
Will the exaggerated whining never end? how is a mini equivalent costing $599 more expensive?



and I love statistics pulled out of the rear brain. relatively unusable and unsuited? Please. Unusable and unsuited for you doesn't equal 99% of Mac users.
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Um, $599 Mini -- $99 external drive

Pretty sure the Mini is more expensive. Of course the Mini is worth the 599, not so sure about the external drive.
 
mauricev said:
How exactly would that work? Booting is handled by the firmware. So it must include a firmware update. Also, it would not work for PowerPC Macs because they don't have EFI.
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PowerPC Macs are capable of booting off network volumes, though, are they not? Same principle at play here...
 
How about being able to use my Macbook drive wirelessly with my AppleTV to watch DVD movies. Now THAT would be useful!
 
mauricev said:
How exactly would that work? Booting is handled by the firmware. So it must include a firmware update. Also, it would not work for PowerPC Macs because they don't have EFI.
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I'm guessing all 10.5.2 will bring is the "Remote Disk" listing within the Finder and build in the ability to host a drive. The system they are using is built on top of NetBoot which has worked on Macs all the way back to the original iMac. The really interesting thing is they have created a small NetBoot server which runs on Mac OS X Client and on Windows. I'm assuming any Mac (PPC/intel) would be able to boot off one of these hosted disks since the Startup Disk pref pane already supports showing them on the network and all macs let you search for a NetBoot volume on the startup by holding the "n" key.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

zephead said:
Aww, I was hoping it would come out of the box in a manila envelope. :p
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That would have been great!!
 
I'm pretty sure they've been mentioning wireless booting in the guided tour video on Apple's website ever since the MBA was announced.

Well, at the end he says you can even use Remote Disc to install a new version of OS X. I guess that kindof equates to the same thing.
 
Regardless of all the negative criticisms, you gotta love wireless booting! :D

Cheers! :apple:
 
Wireless booting, wirelessly using optical disks etc etc This might point to a situation where Apple finally twig and sell some kind of central machine for the home. Like a mac mini but with better storage or that new 1TB airport extreme with an optical drive. I know I want something like this.

This would make Apple TV make a lot more sense too (ie. it can wirelessly play DVDs, stuff you've downloaded etc etc).
 
emotion said:
Wireless booting, wirelessly using optical disks etc etc This might point to a situation where Apple finally twig and sell some kind of central machine for the home. Like a mac mini but with better storage or that new 1TB airport extreme with an optical drive. I know I want something like this.

This would make Apple TV make a lot more sense too (ie. it can wirelessly play DVDs, stuff you've downloaded etc etc).
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You've got a good point there. They could really take this and run with it.
 
Chris Grande said:
Or being able to plug that MacBook Air USB drive into the AppleTV.
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That would be nice upgrade. I just can't stand having two separate units (not that I watch many DVD's anymore). I understand why Apple does not want a DVD player in it because they want people to buy/rent from iTunes, but honestly I think it would sell more units because people could transition nicely over.
 
My question is how do you set up wireless booting with a wpa encryped wireless network with a SSID that is not broadcasted? Can you put these settings into the efi?
 
Mike Teezie said:
Sheesh, those unboxing pictures are making want an Air.
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me too!!!

what is wireless booting tho? and i wish the mba was cheaper, and a bigger hard drive would be nice... also would love an update to the MB with aluminum and the black backlight keyboard! they would sell TONS of those :)
 
digitalbiker said:
It will be interesting to see some performance tests. I wonder how slow this thing will be with the 4200 rpm drive. I also wonder how well the wireless DVD actually works. ...
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Actually, there isn't really a "Wireless DVD" on the MacBook Air.

If you are thinking of watching DVD's for instance by putting the DVD in the closest available PC and watching the thing Wirelessly, then you were not paying that close attention to the KeyNote.

The ability to access a nearby optical drive wirelessly was touted only for software installs. Jobs specifically did not mention watching video over a wirelessly connected optical drive and pointed users in the direction of movies downloaded to the hard drive.

It *might* work, (it would depend on the bit-rate), but this is not something that is specifically listed as possible. We shall see when they ship.

zephead said:
Aww, I was hoping it would come out of the box in a manila envelope. :p
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No one has mentioned it here, but isn't this the first Apple laptop to ship without styrofoam?

That's a big win if you ask me. :)
 
imwoblin said:
I think all the Apple demo Macbook Air's had the solid state drives in them. At least that is what I was told at Macworld.
Click to expand...

That would make sense as the SSD drives are about the same speed as a 10,000 rpm drive without the spin-up issues.

The 1.8" 4200 rpm drives are dog slow! My old PB G4 had the 4200 rpm 2.5" drive running panther. I later replaced it with the faster 7200 drive and it made a huge difference in performance.

I couldn't believe that a drive update would matter that much.

Virgil-TB2 said:
Actually, there isn't really a "Wireless DVD" on the MacBook Air.

If you are thinking of watching DVD's for instance by putting the DVD in the closest available PC and watching the thing Wirelessly, then you were not paying that close attention to the KeyNote.

The ability to access a nearby optical drive wirelessly was touted only for software installs. Jobs specifically did not mention watching video over a wirelessly connected optical drive and pointed users in the direction of movies downloaded to the hard drive.

It *might* work, (it would depend on the bit-rate), but this is not something that is specifically listed as possible. We shall see when they ship.
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Sorry, I should have been more specific with the term "wireless remote optical drive access" instead of "wireless DVD".

I didn't mean to imply anything with regard to DVD videos. I just meant loading software by DVD. Whenever I have loaded software via a network as opposed to a wired DVD device it always takes much longer.

trogdor! said:
My question is how do you set up wireless booting with a wpa encryped wireless network with a SSID that is not broadcasted? Can you put these settings into the efi?
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I was wondering about that too. I wonder if it will only boot wirelessly if there is a pre-existing OS on the system or if they actually have a small hidden boot partition on the HDD.

It seems that the MBA will need some sort of pre-existing file that contains network connection details like login account, passwords, encryption keys, etc. Otherwise how will it connect to the machine that serves the optical media to the MBA.
 
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