I'll bet those Apple hardware designers thought they were pretty clever by making the MacBook Air SuperDrive work only with its namesake. Ahh... but they never met the mistress of mods: tnkgrl! She deftly determined the reason for the optical drive to work only with the Mac. It's not a power issue as some suspcected. It appears to be custom firmware in the conversation between the IDE and USB interfaces. Since firmware hacking proved to be a big challenge, tnkgrl just took it out of the equation by replacing the small circuit board with a $9 equivlient! Now she has a sweet optical drive that works not only with the MacBook Air, but with Earth, Wind and Fire all other PCs too. Now that's what I call putting the "U" back in USB!
