In the keynote speech yesterday at MacWorld Jobs brushed over the MacBook Air SuperDrive fairly quickly giving the message that the need for optical drives are becoming less, especially since the new MacBook Air has no internal optical drive. According to Apple it can download what software it needs through the internet and connect wirelessly to the Time Capsule for backing up and storing data. Apple does know that the end of optical drives is still a ways off and created this MacBook Air SuperDrive as an external optical drive accessory to the MacBook Air, and ONLY for the MacBook Air according to the specs.

It connects and is powered through a single standard USB cable that’s built into the drive so the MacBook Air will power the SuperDrive both when plugged in and when on batteries. The slot-loading SuperDrive is not much bigger than a CD case at 5.47 x 5.47 x 0.67 inches, and weighs 1.09 pounds. It also has some decent speeds with writing CD-Rs at 24x and double-layer DVDs at 4x.

It’s interesting that the SuperDrive has the MacBook Air computer as a system requirement, but that will remain to be seen. Apple says the optical drive accessory will run $99 and we estimating that it will be available at the same time as the MacBook Air in a couple weeks.

MacBook Air SuperDrive