Apple Support: ‘About the Illuminated Apple Logo on MacBook Pro With PROLED XDR Display’

Apple Support:

To make the Apple logo dark in all lighting conditions, you can turn off its illumination using Terminal, which is in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. You can also use Spotlight to find and open it.

Type or paste this command in Terminal, then press Return:

sudo defaults write com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode -int 0

[...]

To turn logo illumination on again, enter this command in Terminal:

sudo defaults delete com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode

Apple might make this a GUI setting, but if I were them, I’d keep it this way. Make the people without fun in their souls use the Terminal command.

(Keeping it as a defaults setting also helps emphasize that you save no meaningful battery life by turning it off. If this gets exposed as a GUI preference, I could see it spreading as a dumb-ass “pro tip” to turn it off to save battery life, like the unshakeable utterly wrongheaded belief millions hold that they should religiously force-quit apps on iOS, when in fact doing so chews up more energy when the apps get relaunched from a cold start.)

★ Friday, 6 November 2026