Why did Apple kill Macbook’s glowing logo
You might wonder why Apple discontinued the glowing logo in the newer MacBooks. Let’s find out.
The glowing logo wasn’t an actual light
Yes, you read it right. The logo never lighted up. It’s a hole, straight through the display. Innovation and Apple are synonyms.
How does the old logo glow?
It gets light from the backlight. The glowing Apple logo is not a light, but rather a window into the backlight of the display. The Apple Logo is illuminated from the rear of the display panel. The light from the display panel passes through apple’s logo, resulting in its illumination. This is the reason behind the change in Apple’s logo brightness with the change in the screen’s brightness.
Problem with the glowing logo
Imagine you are using the MacBook in a relatively darker area. You are sitting with the back of your laptop to the window, and it’s fairly bright outside. Unfortunately, the light doesn’t just go outside the logo, it also comes inside. It creates a floating Apple in the middle of your screen just like a watermark.
If you turn your screen brightness all the way down and shine your flashlight in through the Apple logo, your screen will light up. This has been annoying to many Apple users.
Switching to better screen
Another major reason for the adaptation of a new logo is the change in the display. Apple used LCD screens. They have a backlight behind the pixels, and the pixels only colour the light. The backlight produces the light. The Apple logo is simply a diffuser placed into a cutout in the aluminium. With the advancement in technology, LCD will no longer be in the race.
Apple has to switch to OLED or AMOLED panels. They don’t require backlit. OLEDs generate their own light, rather than needing a backlight. Without the white back-light, they can’t have the glowing white logo. So the translucent window for the logo would have to go away before they switch to Samsung’s OLED panels. Keeping in mind the near future, they are cutting it out early so users don’t complain when they make the switch in the future.
Making MacBooks thinner and lighter
Glowing logos take up much more space in the screen form factor as compared to the Mirror back logos. So to make the screen of the MacBook slimmer than the present Air and Pro models, they need to take out something which makes the screen slimmer. The translucent fibre glowing logo makes the screen thick and has no functionality to it except just a logo. So they decided to move to the mirror back logo. The thin screen would require more strength. A gap in the screen for the glowing logo may damage its durability.
Conclusion
Apple accomplished two things:
They made the Macbook slimmer by saving space and the whole Macbook series now is in sync with the existing iPods and iPhones, all having mirror back logos.
The 2011–2017 model years of the MacBook Air had a backlight. There used to be a cutout with frost glass that lit up when the laptop was running. The MacBook Pro (model years 2008–2014) had this feature too.
Now with the previous MacBook discontinued, no Mac in the present lineup hosts that feature.
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