iFixit Teardown Shows How the MacBook Pro’s Glowing Apple Logo Actually Works
iFixit / YouTube
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The most fun and fascinating part of Apple’s new MacBook Pro isn’t the OLED touchscreen so much as the return of the illuminated Apple logo, and now the folks at iFixit have given us an inside look at precisely how it works.
It was fairly obvious to anyone who knows how OLED panels work that this wasn’t the old-school Apple logo of yesteryear. In the old days — before Apple became the enemy of fun that nixed the glowing logo in the 2016 MacBook Pro models — the logo was simply a cutout that allowed the backlit LED screen to shine through.
However, while many folks undoubtedly took the new glowing Apple logo at face value, choosing to enjoy it without worrying too much about how it works, the reality is that OLED screens don’t have a backlight. That little detail made the return of the glowing logo so much more whimsical, as it proved that Apple had very deliberately engineered it.
After all, it’s one thing to simply carve out a logo and slap in a piece of translucent plastic. It’s another thing entirely to build a custom lighting rig inside the lid of a MacBook Pro.
That’s the kind of attention to detail I’ve loved about Apple since I got my first PowerBook G4 over twenty years ago, and it’s a remarkable way to celebrate the arrival of John Ternus — an engineer — into the CEO’s office. “Because it’s awesome” was quite literally the company’s official answer when asked why it would do such a thing.
Still, while the presence of a separate LED array was a given, iFixit has now torn down the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display to give us an inside look at what Apple has actually done here.
The glowing Apple logo made its return without adding any thickness to the display, and now we can see why. It consists of only four LEDs that shine off a reflective layer, plus a diffuser to ensure the glow is even. What’s more, the actual logo material is a two-way mirror, so it reverts to a sleek, dark metallic finish when the light is off rather than the milky white plastic look of the pre-2016 models. It’s the best of both worlds.
The downside is that the logo isn’t designed to be user-accessible, which isn’t surprising as it’s behind the screen, and Apple typically replaces the entire top cover when dealing with screen damage. To get at it, iFixit actually ended up cracking the OLED panel after the glass delaminated and came away. “I’d love to hear from anyone who’s managed to get one of these out intact,” the host adds.
Apple has published the repair manuals for the new MacBook Pro models, but they say nothing about the logo. The bottom line is that if anything goes wrong with those LEDs, you’ll likely be left with the choice between living with a dark logo or paying for an entire screen replacement.
Beyond the glowing logo and the OLED touchscreen, the new MacBook Pro is very similar to the base M6 mini-LED model that was released earlier this year. Apple has managed to reduce the chassis by 92 grams and the display assembly by 101 grams, which is where most of the new model’s weight reduction comes from, although the trackpad has gotten slightly smaller and lighter, and the battery loses 2 grams. The hinge is also slightly stiffer — what Apple calls “designed for touch” — so that it can hold its angle when you’re poking at the display.
