iFixit teardown shows how Apple's glowing PROLED MacBook logo works

The new laptop goes the extra mile to recreate the iconic feature.

iFixit

iFixit has shared its teardown of Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro and besides bemoaning the company's half-hearted commitment to user repairability, it also showed off the physical components that make the laptop's glowing logo work. The new lid design is one of the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display's many charms, alongside its tandem OLED display and lighter weight.

Older LCD MacBooks featured a physical cutout that let the display's backlight illuminate the logo, but since OLED screens don't require backlights, Apple had to come up with a different solution to bring the design element back. iFixit found that the company uses a light strip with four LEDs layered behind the display, whose light is reflected through a diffuser to illuminate the logo. The Apple logo itself is also coated "like a two-way mirror," according to iFixit, so that it can appear metallic and reflective when the logo is off, but still let light through when the LEDs are on.

Apple ditched the glowing logo in 2016, so it's a bit ironic that the company waited until it stopped using backlit displays to bring it back. It used to be a cool bit of branding before, but now the company may see the glowing logo design as an important way to distinguish its most expensive laptop from the kind we peons are forced to use.

The rest of the internal changes to the laptop are more expected. Apple was able to achieve the new MacBook Pro's lighter weight by using less aluminum in the base and lid of the laptop and including a slightly smaller trackpad. The laptop's hinge was also reworked to make the display wobble less when you tap the screen. Those changes don't make it any easier to fix, though. The laptop is still complex to disassemble: For example, iFixit says that you have to remove the laptop's logic board to switch out its USB-C ports. Plenty of other components, like the MacBook's memory and the HDMI port, are also soldered in place. Anyone dropping up to $15,000 on a laptop probably isn't worried about doing their own repairs, but Apple's thin and light (and glowing) design comes with some tradeoffs, as always.