I suppose it is also possible to have a driver figure out where it is in a USB chain, and just not attach if it's not next to the root of the chain, but that's beyond weird.Įlectrically speaking, I don't know if whatever reports negotiated power can report past the 500mA spec of USB.

The hub may not be able to pass such a packet. Less and less common today, but they still exist. Lots of Windows-only devices that do this sort of thing. The only time where a driver isn't likely to work through a hub is where you're signaling out of spec via a handshake packet, or some such, that you're a special device. You can daisy chain 4 hubs together and have any random, standard device attached to the last hub and it will work, as long as you electrically satisfy the daisy chain requirements (power your hubs, power your devices, etc). Hubs and hub drivers should be transparent to the device driver it's all a bunch of recursive hooks through the abstraction layer. USB and Firewire drivers attach through hubs. I've generalized a few things, but most of this logic is consistent with what I do know from my school days. So after thinking about this a bit, this is my thought process. There wasn't an obvious kernel extension driver we could find that supports the SuperDrive, although the Air ships with at least two unique Extensions: AppleUSBMultitouch for the trackpad and ApplePlatformEnabler.

The SuperDrive shows up on the Air as the OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5630A (below). If that's not the case, it's simply a mystery as to why the new SuperDrive is Air-only, as a number of users (and employees) at the Apple Store remarked about wanting to buy it for use with another Mac.

It is possible that Apple is offering the drive as a loss leader convenience for Air users, and doesn't want to support the drive on other systems because it's not making any money on it. It uses the standard 500mA USB power, and when plugged into other Macs, it shows up as a recognized USB device (below, plugged into a MacBook Pro).Īll that appears to be missing is the software driver. There's no obvious physical reason for this our previous observation that Apple was using a higher powered bus to drive the SuperDrive turned out to be wrong. For some reason, Apple doesn't support the new SuperDrive on anything other than the Air.

Macbook air superdrive on windows 10