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The new MacBook Air featuring Apple’s M1 CPU has been released, so have you upgraded from a prior model MacBook Air or Pro? To put it another way: the new MacBook Air keyboard has a modest but noteworthy improvement. Dedicated Spotlight, Dictation, and Do Not Disturb buttons have been added to the MacBook Air 2020 with an Apple silicon chip’s keyboard. The Intel MacBook line’s Launchpad and Keyboard Brightness controls have been replaced with the new function keys.
However, the new M1 MacBook Pro has a Touch Bar instead of a function row, therefore this update does not apply to it. Existing Macbook users may be haunted by this little change while upgrading to the MacBook Air M1 in late 2020. This is due to the fact that the standard F5 and F6 buttons cannot be used to manually increase the brightness of the keyboard on the M1 MacBook Air.
Not to worry! Changing the brightness of the backlit keyboard on an M1 MacBook Air running macOS Big Sur is still feasible, though. The main drawback is that physical keys are no longer available for adjusting the brightness of the keyboard or turning it on and off. See how we can get this done.
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The end. Similarly, you don’t need to use the keyboard to change the brightness of the display using the Control Center.
To turn off the keyboard light on the M1 MacBook Air, just drag the slider to ‘0’ level. Doing so will turn off the keyboard illumination.
TIP #1: Drag and drop the keyboard brightness control from Control Center to the menu bar for quicker access.
Alternatively, go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar and select “Keyboard Brightness” from the sidebar. Then enable the “Show in Menu Bar” option.
TIP #2: Don’t want your MacBook to automatically adjust keyboard brightness according to ambient lighting conditions? In that case, go to System Preferences > Keyboard. Uncheck the “Adjust keyboard brightness in low light” option.
There is a backlight present on the keyboard of the MacBook Pro M1, as stated earlier. You have the ability to make adjustments to the brightness by using the Control Center.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but the Apple Magic keyboards do not come with any kind of backlighting. It is impossible to illuminate due to the fact that it is impermeable to water and the printings on the keys are simply made of standard white paint. This makes it impossible to use water to clean it.
You are going to have to turn on a setting. Go to the Settings menu, then select System Preferences from the Apple menu, then select Keyboard from the menu that appears, and finally, uncheck the option that says ‘Automatically illuminate keyboard in low light.’