Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
If you have another Mac kicking around, it's natural to want to share things between that Mac and your
MacBook Air: documents, Safari bookmarks, iTunes libraries, downloads, and more. The standard way of shar-
ing data between computers is to create a network. However, that requires a central connection point for the
computers, usually a router. If you don't have such networking hardware handy (for example, you're in a hotel
room or on a plane), you might think that sharing is off the table, but that's not true. There are actually several
ways that you can connect two Macs directly: with a Thunderbolt cable, with a network (or crossover) cable, or
by creating an ad hoc wireless network. The next two sections provide the Thunderbolt and network cable de-
tails; see Chapter 2 to learn about creating an ad hoc wireless network.
Connecting to another Mac using a Thunderbolt cable
If you have a fourth- or fifth-generation MacBook Air and you just happen to have a Thunderbolt cable lying
around, that's great because you can use it to connect MacBook Air and another Mac via their Thunderbolt
ports and share files between them. I'm assuming here, of course, that the other Mac also comes with a Thun-
derbolt port (as almost all recent Macs do; the one exception is the Mac Pro).
Besides connecting the two Macs using the Thunderbolt cable, you also have to make sure that your Macs are
configured to share files. Follow these steps:
1. Click System Preferences in the Dock.
2. Click the Sharing icon.
The Sharing preferences appear.
3. Turn on file sharing.
•
OS X Mountain Lion, Lion, Leopard, or Snow Leopard.
Select the File Sharing check box.
•
Earlier versions of OS X.
Select the Personal File Sharing check box.
4. If you feel like it, you can also use the Computer Name text box to edit the name of your Mac,
which is the name that will appear in the Network window of the other Mac.
To see the other Mac, open Finder and then choose Go →Network (or press Shift+ +K). Double-click the
Mac's icon, click Connect As (in Lion or Leopard) or Connect (in earlier versions), and then type a name and
password to connect to the other computer.
Connecting to another Mac using a network cable
The other way to connect MacBook Air to another Mac directly is to string a network cable between them. A
network cable is also called a
twisted-pair
cable (because it consists of four pairs of twisted copper wires that
together form a circuit that can transmit data), and it comes with an RJ-45 jack on each end.
Your MacBook Air doesn't come with an Ethernet port, of course, so you'll need to connect an Ethernet adapter
to one of MacBook Air's USB ports. A good example is Apple's USB Ethernet adapter, shown in Figure 1.12.
One of the network cable's RJ-45 jacks plugs into the Ethernet adapter, and the other connects to the corres-
ponding Ethernet port on the other Mac.
The connection is basically the same as with a Thunderbolt cable, so I'll just give you the barebones steps here
(see the previous section to flesh out the details):
1. Connect the network cable to both Macs.
2. Turn on file sharing on both Macs.
3. Use Finder's Network window (choose Go
→
Network) to connect to the other Mac.
