Apple usb superdrive is not supported on this mac

Hey Tex, Did you ever get a good work around for your USB superdrive. I get the same error you stated here in the terminal window and I tried it a couple different ways but still no luck. Cant believe my wife's Samsung usb drive works fine on my mac but cant get the apple to work.

I sure haven't gotten it to work TJAX. I've given up. My daughter has an older Mac Air I used to import the files. Then used a USB drive to transfer the files to my iTunes folder. Rather sad I have to go that route, isn't it? But then I suppose I bear responsibility for modifying my computer seeing as it did ship with a CD/DVD player and chose to modify that configuration myself. Somehow that caused it to not want to play nice any longer with an Apple external CD/DVD player.

I am pondering trying other CD/DVD players (non-apple) to see if they work with this laptop. I'm mostly hoping, though, for a new Mac Pro to be released. I've been saving up several years for the next iteration of that to appear, should Apple decide to continue in the power user category. I'm not sure they are going to though, seems they are more a consumer company now (and a good one at that), but how knows? After they dropped Aperture when I built my whole photography everything around that, I don't trust they will do anything for long. Once burned, twice shy.

Hey Tex, thanks for the quick reply. Below is what I sent Apple and even had them on the phone last night and they suggested I take it to an authorized Apple dealer to see what they could figure out. So today I did and we tried a couple other times in safe mode but still no go. They suggested to go into recovery mode and try to change in the terminal but a little leery of that. Anyway you mentioned about using a non-apple cd drive, my wife’s Samsung works with no problems. I just want my apple cd to work and don’t understand why an apple device wouldn’t do the same???

I have an early 2011 MAcBook Pro running 10.12.2 that I just replaced the non working internal Optical drive with a new second SSD that greatly increased the speed of the mac. I then bought an external usb apple superdrive but when I connect to my computer I get “The Apple USB SuperDrive is not supported on this Mac”. My wife’s Samsung works fine on here, not sure why an Apple product doesn’t do the same? But obviously it is a common problem form what I’ve discovered trying to find a fix. I have tried the terminal window codes in the two methods I found but in both cases get an error that will not save. First try was to type (sudo nvram boot-args=“mbasd=1”) in terminal then password and when I hit enter I get (nvram: Error setting variable - ‘boot-args’: (iokit/common) general error).

Second try was as follows...

1. open a terminal, 2. type (on a single line) sudo pico /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist 3. Insert mbasd=1 in the String 4. Save (press Ctrl-X, answer yes to save by pressing Y, press enter to confirm the file name). 5. Restart your machine. However when I hit enter to confirm the file name I get this error...

[ Error writing/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist.

Apparently these methods have worked for several others but not sure what I’m doing wrong.

Have a Merry Christmas Tex for you and your family.

Good morning -- had this issue and decided to try something different and used a WindowsPC close by and the USB controller picked up the Superdrive and it worked with Windows 7 Professional 64Bit

I keep getting "nvram: Error setting variable - 'boot-args': (iokit/common) general error"

Any idea what this means? It accepts my password but then gives this error message.

What do you do if you have SPierre 10.12.5?