Apple brought the glowing logo back on its touchscreen MacBook Pro but gave it no on-off toggle. Here's the Terminal fix, the free app alternative and the repair catch.
Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro with the PROLED XDR display brings back the glowing Apple logo on the lid, but there's no switch for it in System Settings. To turn it off, open Terminal, paste the command Apple documents in its support material, and enter your password. The light goes dark at once and stays off for every account on that Mac.
The light comes from four LEDs behind the OLED panel, which iFixit says makes it very hard to repair: a broken logo means a new screen. Only the 14-inch and 16-inch PROLED models have it, starting at $2,899 and $3,399 in the US.
If you want to know how to turn off the MacBook Pro Apple logo light, the short answer is one line in Terminal. Apple brought the glowing logo back on the lid of its new touchscreen MacBook Pro, but it didn’t put an off switch anywhere in System Settings, so the official route is a command you paste in and confirm with your password.
That matters if you work in a dark bedroom, sit at the back of a lecture hall, or simply don’t want a bright Apple shining at everyone across the café table. The good news: the change sticks, it covers every user account on the Mac, and you can undo it just as quickly. There’s also a free app that gives you a proper dimmer, which Apple itself doesn’t offer.
You turn the logo off by writing one setting to macOS with an administrator command. Apple describes this method in its own support documentation, and it takes under a minute.
Because the setting is saved system-wide, you only need to do this once. Anyone else who logs in to the same Mac gets a dark logo too.
Changed your mind? Open Terminal again and paste sudo defaults delete com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode, then enter your password. That removes the setting you added, and the Mac goes back to Apple’s default behavior. Apple also notes that a fresh reinstall of macOS lights the logo up again, so if you ever wipe the machine, you’ll need to repeat the off command afterward.
Copy both commands exactly, including the capital letters in the setting name.
Yes, but only indirectly with Apple’s own controls. Out of the box, the logo is lit whenever the Mac is awake with the lid open, and its brightness rises and falls with the main display. The ambient light sensor plays a part too, so the glow adjusts to the room you’re in.
That means lowering screen brightness dims the logo. It works, but it’s a poor trade, because you probably set your screen brightness for comfortable reading, not to hide a light on the back. There’s no separate slider for the logo in System Settings.
Designer Juan Buis built an app called Backglow to fill that gap. The free version lets you:
A one-time Pro upgrade costs $9 for a limited time, rising to $15 later. It adds a Music mode, where the logo pulses with whatever you’re playing, and an Agents mode that throbs gently while Claude Code is working and blinks when the AI coding tool needs your input. What no app can do is change the color: the light is a plain white LED.
If you only want the logo off, the Terminal command does the job for free with nothing extra installed. If you’d like it softer rather than gone, Backglow is the simpler choice.
Only the new MacBook Pro models with Apple’s PROLED XDR display, the first touchscreen Macs. They come in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, run on M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, and start at $2,899 and $3,399 respectively in the US.
Apple stopped lighting the logo on its laptops from 2015 and 2016, so older models have no glowing logo to control.
The old glow was a happy side effect. From the PowerBook G3 in 1999 until the mid-2010s, Apple laptops used an LCD screen lit from behind, and the logo was a cutout that let some of that backlight shine through. Dim the screen and the logo dimmed with it, and there was no way to control it separately.
Apple started dropping the glow in 2015, beginning with the 12-inch MacBook and its shiny metal logo, and the Pro line lost it in 2016. OLED screens made a comeback even harder, because every OLED pixel makes its own light. There’s no backlight at all, so there’s nothing to leak through a hole in the lid.
So Apple added a dedicated light source just for the logo. When iFixit took the 14-inch model apart, it found four LEDs behind the logo, plus a reflective layer and a diffuser that spread the light into an even glow. A coating that works like a two-way mirror gives the logo a shiny look when it’s dark and lets light through when it’s on.
Why bother? Apple’s answer to a reporter at a launch briefing was simply “Because it’s awesome.” When John Ternus, Apple’s new CEO, introduced the laptop, his line was “The logo is back.”
Here’s the part worth knowing before you buy: the logo’s light sits directly behind the OLED display. If it ever stops working, the realistic fix is a whole new screen assembly. During its teardown, iFixit tried to separate the display and the glass came away from the layers underneath, which destroyed the OLED panel.
The rest of the teardown was more mixed than bad. The bottom case now comes off with four screws instead of eight, swapping logic boards between two units caused no parts-pairing problems once Apple’s Repair Assistant ran, and the USB-C ports are screwed in rather than soldered. But the storage, memory, HDMI port and SD card slot are soldered to the board. iFixit scored the laptop 5 out of 10 for repairability, a point better than the previous MacBook Pro design.
None of that changes whether you should turn the light off. It does mean a cracked or faulty screen takes the logo with it, and the reverse is true too.
For most owners, the glow is harmless fun, and leaving it on costs you nothing in setup time. Turn it off if it bothers you in a dark room, if you’d rather not advertise an expensive laptop in public, or if you share a space where light at night is an issue.
None of the details shared so far put a number on how much power the logo draws. If battery life is your worry, Backglow’s Battery mode is a middle ground that fades the light as your charge runs down.
And if you change your mind next month, the undo command takes seconds. Nothing you do here touches your files or your display settings.
No. System Settings has no toggle. Apple’s documented method is a Terminal command, or you can use a third-party app such as Backglow.
By default it lights only while the Mac is awake with the lid open. Backglow can keep it lit with the lid closed if you want that.
Yes. Apple says a reinstall restores the glow, so run the off command again afterward.
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