Once common in lecture halls and coffee shops around the world, the glowing emblem of an Apple logo was featured on the lid of many Mac laptops released in the early 2000s. In a nice touch, the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with PROLED XDR displays bring back the much-loved logo. It turns on whenever the Mac is awake and automatically dims or brightens depending on the brightness level of your screen and the ambient light in the room.
If you prefer to keep the logo dark, Apple has shared a way to disable it. Unusually, there is no switch in the system settings. Instead, you must enter a command in the Terminal app. If this seems intimidating, don’t worry: it’s just one line that you can copy and paste. Note that the following command only works on MacBook Pro models with a PROLED XDR display.
- Open Terminal on your Mac: it’s in the Applications ➝ Utilities folder, or you can search for “Terminal” using Spotlight (Command + Space).
- Type or paste the following command, then press Enter:
Sudo defaults write com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode -int 0
- When prompted, enter your administrator password and tap Enter. (The terminal does not display the password when you type it.)
After completing the steps, the logo lighting should turn off immediately, no restart is necessary. The change applies to all macOS user accounts on the machine and will persist even if you boot from macOS Recovery. If you later migrate to a new Mac, the setting even carries over with the rest of your system.
Turn the Apple logo back on
Reinstalling macOS turns the lighting back on, but you can also turn it back on yourself at any time by entering the following command in Terminal:
Sudo defaults remove com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode
Don’t forget to press Enter!
History
The first Mac laptop with an illuminated Apple logo was the third-generation PowerBook G3 released in 1999. The illuminated symbol proved a mainstay of consecutive Apple laptops over the next 16 years. The only change during this period was that the logo was flipped, so that it no longer appeared upside down to viewers when someone was sitting in public with the lid open.
According to Joe Moreno, a former Apple employee, the initial direction was deliberate: Apple’s design group found that users were always trying to open their laptops from the wrong side. “Steve Jobs always focused on providing the best possible user experience and believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the viewer,” Moreno recalls.
Ironically, Jobs later reversed this decision.
“Opening a laptop from the wrong side is a self-correcting problem that only lasts a few seconds,” Moreno said. “However, seeing the logo upside down is a problem that lasts indefinitely.”
The anterior orientation, seen in Sex and the city (Image: HBO/Everett/Rex Features)
In 2015, Apple began removing illuminated badges from its laptops, starting with the ultra-thin 12-inch MacBook, which instead featured a polished metal logo, like iPads before it. In 2016, a new generation of MacBook Pro models continued the unlit trend. Apple hasn’t released a Mac laptop with a glowing logo since – until now.
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