This is how Apple created the glowing Apple logo on MacBook Pro PROLED XDR
Apple put a great deal of care and effort in every standout feature on its new MacBook Pro PROLED XDR, including a huge amount of ingenuity in creating the clever glowing Apple logo on its lid.
What makes the logo so interesting is how it works.
A little shine and magic
Open the lid and it bursts into life with that familiar shining Apple logo pro users have missed for years. Yet, when the lid is shut, the logo literally becomes a black mirror.
When I met with Apple’s Vice President of Mac and iPad Product Marketing, Tom Boger, he pointed to that logo as a small feature on the Mac’s design he and his team took a lot of pride in.
“Bringing the illuminated logo back,” he said. “We know that our customers, their lives are on their Mac, right? I mean, this is such an important tool for them. And they also take great pride in it, right? And, you know, one of the ways that we can honor the relationship that the customer has with their Mac is by bringing the Illuminated logo back,” he told me.
“You know we used to do this years ago. We wanted to bring it back in a much more elevated way. And so, the magic here is, like, if you look at that logo, it’s still reflective. It’s still got that mirror-like finish,” he said.
“Well, okay, if it has that mirror-like finish, how the heck does it look like that?” he said, opening the lid to turn the black mirror into a burst of light.
How is it done
iFixit criminally tore a MacBook Pro PROLED XDR apart to find out what’s inside. You can read their entire tear down here, or watch the video below, but they also found more on the logo.
“This is the first MacBook without a backlight. Which makes it especially weird that Apple has finally brought back the glowing apple on the back of the screen,” they said.
To find out how it works they had to take a display panel apart (“We killed a panel to figure out how it works,” they said.)
Their investigation revealed that the glowing logo uses four LEDs and a one-way mirror.
There’s even more tech inside, in that to create this effect the LEDs pass light through reflection and diffusion layers, and then through that one-way mirror Apple logo.
“That’s how it’s shiny when closed but glowing when open.”
Here’s the teardown video – and please subscribe to The Core for our human-curated fix of daily Apple news.
