Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro has a trick on its lid that nobody asked for and plenty of longtime Mac users will recognize instantly: the Apple logo on the back glows again.
It is the first MacBook in close to a decade to do it. Apple dropped the lit-up logo when it redesigned the MacBook lineup in 2016, and the reason was mostly practical. Those older laptops used LCD panels, and the backlight that lit the screen also leaked through a cutout in the lid to light the logo. When Apple switched to screens that didn't need a backlight at all, the glow went away with it.
The new touchscreen MacBook Pro's display, which Apple calls PROLED XDR, is built around two stacked OLED layers, a construction often referred to as tandem OLED. Every pixel in an OLED panel produces its own light, so there is no backlight behind the screen to begin with. According to Gadgets 360's reporting on the new PROLED XDR panel, that absence of a backlight layer frees up physical space inside an already thinner lid, and Apple used that spare room for something the laptop didn't strictly need: a small, dedicated light source sitting just behind the Apple logo, isolated from the rest of the display.
TechRadar's Lance Ulanoff, who says he has seen the laptop in person, describes the logo as looking like polished metal when the lid is shut and switching to a bright white glow once it's opened. He writes that the light appears to add no extra thickness to the lid and draws no measurable power, which lines up with how small and separate the light source is from the screen's own pixels.
Apple hadn't said much about any of this ahead of the launch beyond a brief tease. CEO John Ternus posted a short clip on X showing light catching the logo on a flat surface, which Ulanoff initially read as a generic nod to the Apple brand rather than a literal preview. During the launch presentation, Ternus confirmed it directly, telling the crowd "the logo is back," a line TechRadar says drew an enthusiastic reaction in the room.
There's a practical angle buried under the nostalgia too. With the touchscreen MacBook Pro now sitting at the top of Apple's laptop lineup alongside non-touch models, a lid that glows is also a quick visual flag, Ulanoff notes, that whoever is carrying it has the new, more expensive machine.
One detail Apple has not explained, per TechRadar, is how the logo keeps its brushed-metal look when the laptop is closed and the light is off, only to flip to a glowing white surface when it's powered on and opened. Ulanoff calls it an engineering secret he doubts Apple will spell out even after teardown specialists get their hands on the machine.
Apple has confirmed the touchscreen MacBook Pro as a new addition to its lineup. Full India pricing and availability details for the model were not addressed in this reporting.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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