When Apple CEO John Ternus announced the first touchscreen Mac last month, the biggest reaction in the room wasn’t for the MacBook Pro PROLED’s OLED touchscreen or the thinner, lighter chassis; it was for the illuminated lid logo. It’s a return to the glowing logos of older MacBooks, which Apple began phasing out in 2015 and which completely disappeared in the 2018 MacBook Air redesign. It’s a piece of nostalgia, but it worked. It’s fun!
As before, the brightness of the new logo is linked to that of the screen: the lighter or darker the screen, the brighter or darker the logo. But the glowing logo on older MacBooks was illuminated by the screen backlight, and an OLED display doesn’t have that. Thanks to iFixit, we now know that it is illuminated by four white LEDs and synchronized with the screen brightness by software. But that means Apple could have used RGB LEDs.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple or something in between? On the lid of your new MacBook Pro? Why not? After all, Apple insists that it’s still serious about gaming, and nothing says “serious about gaming” like RGB lighting.
I was secretly hoping that users could customize the cutout of the light cover, much like the Xbox logo on Microsoft’s Elite Series 2 controllers. But alas, no luck. You can turn off the lighting with certain Terminal commands or take control of it with a third-party application. But when it is turned on, it is only lit with white light. And iFixit’s disassembly also showed the difficulty of accessing these LEDs (the screen delaminated and broke in the process). So we’re unlikely to see RGB LED mods, unless someone is brave enough to void their warranty and risk an expensive screen repair on their $3,000 laptop.
The most fun you can have with the Apple lid logo is to install a free third-party app like LogoLight and make it pulse, breathe, follow the beat of the music you’re listening to, or flash Morse code. There’s some fun there, but if you combined these features with a splash of color, we’d really be cooking.
MacBooks aren’t gaming laptops, so the RGB lighting might seem inconsistent, but the multi-color LEDs could have been a cool Easter egg. Nobody thought Apple would put a touchscreen on a MacBook either, and the iPhone Duo and HomeView also show that Apple is in a new era of experimentation at the start of the Ternus era. Perhaps if the illuminated lid logo one day appears on future MacBook Air or MacBook Neo, Apple could let loose a little.
Gn tech
