How to Disable Auto-Brightness on Your Mac

Owners of Macs with built-in displays likely know that the screen brightness can be changed via the function keys on the keyboard or in the macOS user interface via System Preferences or a third party utility. But you may have also noticed that, by default, your Mac’s screen adjusts its brightness levels automatically.

Your Mac uses a built-in ambient light sensor to detect the brightness of the room and can then automatically raise or lower your Mac’s screen brightness accordingly. In a room with low light? Your screen will dim itself so it doesn’t blast you off your couch with its insane light levels. And if you’re on a sunny beach with your laptop, it’ll automatically brighten its display to improve visibility. (If you’re on a beach with your iMac instead, well…kudos to you).

But some users prefer to have complete control over their Mac’s screen brightness and don’t want the system changing it for them. Thankfully, it’s easy to disable auto-brightness on your Mac. Here’s how.

Disable Auto-Brightness in macOS

1. Click on the Apple Menu at the upper-left corner of your screen and choose System Preferences.
2. Choose the Displays pane.
3. Under the Display tab there, deselect the Automatically adjust brightness option.

Once you deselect that option, your screen will no longer brighten or dim without your say-so! Of course, you can manually adjust that setting either from this same System Preferences > Displays > Display pane using the “Brightness” slider shown above, or you can use the appropriate function keys (or the Touch Bar) on your keyboard. Those function keys are usually F1 and F2, but you’ll note they’re the ones with the sun icons on them.

Finally, there’s one more way to disable auto-brightness functionality—by doing so for your backlit keyboard. If you’ve got a laptop where the keys glow a bit, you can again either let the Mac decide how bright to make that glow or force it to stay at a brightness level you specify. To do that, visit Apple Menu > System Preferences > Keyboard, and under the “Keyboard” tab, deselect “Adjust keyboard brightness in low light.”

To change the brightness level of this afterward, again you can use the proper function keys (usually F5 and F6) or the controls on your Touch Bar, which look like…um…little sunrises? Of which the smaller one makes the backlight dimmer? These things are hard to describe, my friends.

Within System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard, you can also configure how long you’d like the backlight to stay on after your Mac stops being used. The keyboard backlight drains your battery, of course, so just like the display brightness, you’ll want to adjust these settings appropriate to your level of tolerance for battery usage. I like my display bright as bright can be most of the time, so I’m willing to drain my battery a bit faster to get to see my screen all lit up and stuff.

Oh, and one more thing—if you’re curious about how to adjust similar settings on the iPhone or iPad, head on over and read TekRevue’s own Jim Tanous give us his take on that!

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