Sometimes, things come back very quickly.

In my last post, I essentially told the tale how I came to buying an optical drive for my laptop. Today, I will tell the tale why I got rid of it again.

Overall, the MacBook Air SuperDrive is a very decent optical drive. It reads and writes all kinds of media, is small (about the size of a jewel case) and light (about two apples, no pun intended), and – as most Apple products – looks and feels gorgeous.

I was quite happy with it, but given that the only purpose of it was installing Windows 7, I thought it might be a bit of a waste letting it rot away in some desk drawer. Since I have an iMac as well (as a home computer and media hub), I came up with an idea how to recycle the SuperDrive in a beneficial fashion.

My plan was the following:

1. Replace the internal optical drive of the iMac with an SSD.
2. Attach the MacBook Air SuperDrive via USB, when necessary.

This seemed to be a good compromise to me: it would speed up working on the desktop computer, the (seldomly used) optical drive could be plugged in on demand, and some poor Mac user with a broken optical drive would probably pay a few quid for the old drive on eBay.

You might have noticed a certain order in the above list. Luckily, my year-long experience in IT combined with some healthy scepticism told me to start with step 2, and not with step 1. It turns out that this was a very good idea. The MacBook Air SuperDrive fulfils all marketing promises the name lets you assume: it works on the MacBook Air. And the latest Mac mini. And – drumroll – nowhere else.

A quick search on Google yields various explanations for this, the reasoning behind greatly varies, and is usually wrong – no special cable required, no quirky power problems. The drive is just a regular ATAPI-compatible and as such, should work fine on every (even not so) modern system. If you dig deeper, you find that it doesn’t work because Apple made it so. In fact, some guy at Infinite Loop, Cupertino (CA) thought it would be a brilliant idea to replace the IDE-to-USB bridge, a $9 $8 piece of hardware, by some kludge that does nothing more but a handshake with the computer to ensure being useless in most cases. A screwdriver and the aforementioned replacement part, along with a very decent explanation by some smart person, allows you to fix the problem.

I, however, grew too old already for wasting my time with fixing a product I spent a lot of money for and, although subversive tendencies brought me quite close to doing so, finally decided not to follow the procedure.

Rather than that, I made use of a German law regarding so-called “doorstep transactions” (which also covers online retail), which essentially says that you are allowed to order stuff, try it out for 14 days, and – if you don’t like it – send it back without giving a reason. The retailer (in this case amazon.de) is required to fully refund you, including shipping cost for the return.

So now I have Windows installed, for free, although I would have paid for it. But if you, Apple, really don’t want my money, then fine: I’ll find something else to spend it for.

And sorry, Amazon, for wasting your money because of this.