Control the Glowing Apple Logo on Your New MacBook Pro

Once a common sight in lecture theaters and coffee shops everywhere, the glowing emblem of an Apple logo featured on the lids of many Mac laptops launched 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's lit up whenever the Mac is awake, and it automatically dims or brightens based on your screen's brightness level and the ambient light in the room. Image credit: MacRumors forum member sniffies If you'd rather keep the logo dark, Apple has shared a way to turn it off. Unusually though, there's no switch in System Settings. Instead, you need 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. 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 press Enter. (Terminal doesn't show the password as you type it.) After performing the steps, the logo illumination should turn off immediately, no restart required. The change applies to all macOS user accounts on the machine, and it will carry over even if you start up from macOS Recovery. If you later migrate to a new Mac, the setting even transfers across with the rest of your system. Relight the Apple Logo Reinstalling macOS turns the illumination back on, but you can also turn it back on yourself at any time by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo defaults delete com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode Remember to press Enter! Backstory The first Mac laptop with a lit-up Apple logo was the third-generation PowerBook G3 launched in 1999. The glowing symbol proved a mainstay…