When Apple CEO John Ternus announced the first touchscreen Mac last month, the biggest reaction in the room wasn’t for the PROLED MacBook Pro’s OLED touchscreen or the thinner and lighter chassis; it was for the illuminated lid logo. It’s a throwback to the light-up logos on the old MacBooks, which Apple started phasing out in 2015, and which were completely gone by the 2018 MacBook Air redesign. It’s a nostalgia play, but boy did it work. It’s fun!
Just like in the old days, the new logo’s brightness is linked to the screen’s: The brighter or dimmer the screen, the brighter or dimmer the logo. But the light-up logo on the old MacBooks was illuminated by the screen’s backlight, and an OLED display doesn’t have one. Thanks to iFixit, we now know it’s lit by four white LEDs and synced with the screen’s brightness by software. But that means Apple could have used RGB LEDs.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, or anything in between? On the lid of your new MacBook Pro? Why not? After all, Apple insists it’s still serious about gaming, and nothing says “serious about gaming” like RGB lighting.
I was secretly hoping users would be able to customize the illuminated lid cutout much like the Xbox logo on Microsoft’s Elite Series 2 controllers. But alas, no luck. You can turn off the illumination with some Terminal commands or take control of it with a third-party app. But when it’s lit, it’s only lit with white light. And iFixit’s teardown also showed the difficulty of accessing those LEDs (the screen delaminated and broke in the process). So we’re unlikely to see LED RGB mods for it unless someone’s brave enough to void their warranty and risk a pricey 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 have it pulse, breathe, match the beat of any music you’re playing, or flash some 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 RGB lighting may seem like a mismatch, but multicolor 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 Apple is in a new age of experimentation during the early Ternus era. Maybe if the light-up lid logo ever comes to future MacBook Airs or a MacBook Neo, Apple could cut loose a little.