The current crop of iMacs, released earlier this year, can now take advantage of OS X Lion’s over-the-air Recovery, thanks to a firmware update made available yesterday.
The feature, which is included with all new Macs launched since Lion was released in July, means that users can re-install the operating system without using an external disk or optical media. Lion was the first version of OS X to be sold as a download.
The over-the-air Recovery works in the same way as Lion’s built-in Recovery, which stores a bootable image on a hidden partition on a Macs hard drive. It is designed to be used when the hard drive is completely inaccessible. It requires a broadband Internet connection.
The MacBook Pros released in February, which were superseded earlier this week, had a firmware update recently which also added recovery over the air.
Yesterday’s firmware update also fixed a problem for 2011 iMacs, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and Mac minis connected to Thunderbolt Displays and improved Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode.
