Once common in classrooms and coffee shops around the world, the glowing Apple logo emblem was featured on the lid of many Mac laptops released in the early 2000s. In a nice touch, the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with PROLED XDR displays feature the much-loved logo. It turns on whenever your Mac is active and automatically dims or brightens based on the brightness level of the screen and the ambient light in the room.
If you prefer to keep the logo dark, Apple has shared a way to turn it off. Unusually, though, there’s no toggle in the System Settings. Instead, you have to enter a command in the Terminal app. If that sounds intimidating, don’t worry: it’s a single line that you can copy and paste. Please note that the following command only works on MacBook Pro models with PROLED XDR displays.
- Open Terminal on your Mac: it’s located in the Applications ➝ Utilities folder, or you can search for “Terminal” using Spotlight (Command + Space).
- Type or paste the following command, then press Enter:
Defaults sudo write com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode -int 0
- When prompted, enter your administrator password and press Enter. (The terminal does not display the password as you type it.)
After following the steps, the logo lighting should turn off immediately, without the need for a reboot. The change applies to all macOS user accounts on your computer and will carry over even if you boot from macOS Recovery. If you later migrate to a new Mac, the setting carries over to the rest of your system as well.
Turn the Apple logo back on
Reinstalling macOS turns the light back on, but you can also turn it back on yourself at any time by entering the following command in Terminal:
The default sudo settings eliminate com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode
Remember to press Enter!
Backstory
The first Mac laptop with the illuminated Apple logo was the third-generation PowerBook G3 launched in 1999. The illuminated symbol proved to be a mainstay on all consecutive Apple notebooks for the next 16 years. The only change around that time was that the logo was flipped upright, so that it no longer appeared upside down to viewers when someone was sitting in public with the lid open.
According to former Apple employee Joe Moreno, the original orientation was intentional: Apple’s design team had discovered that users were trying to open their laptops from the wrong side. “Steve Jobs was always focused on providing the best user experience possible and believed it was more important to please the user than the viewer,” Moreno recalled.
Ironically, Jobs later reversed the decision.
“Opening a laptop from the wrong side is a self-solving problem that only lasts a few seconds,” Moreno said. “However, seeing the logo above is a problem that lasts indefinitely.”
The previous orientation, seen in Sex and the city (Image: HBO/Everett/Rex Features)
In 2015, Apple began eliminating illuminated signs from its laptops, starting with the ultra-thin 12-inch MacBook, which instead had a shiny metal logo, like iPads before. In 2016, a new generation of MacBook Pro models continued the shutdown trend. Since then, until now, Apple has never released a Mac laptop with the glowing logo.
