The first MacBook Pro that lacked Apple's iconic backlit logo was released in 2016. A decade later, it's back.

For a long time, the thing about the lit Apple logo on the lid of its portables was that it was the wrong way around. It was positioned for the user to see as they opened the lid, while it was then upside down for anyone passing by.

Never one to miss out on good advertising, Apple flipped that logo around. To this day its glowing symbol shines out from concert stages around the world.

It just also tells you how long it is since those concert musicians updated. Because the very first Apple laptop to eschew the lit logo was the 2015 12-inch MacBook, and then the first MacBook Pro was in 2016.

What it was

It was more symbolic than anything technical. Apple just cut out a hole in the shape of its logo and stuck some translucent plastic in there. Since the lid contained the backlighting for the front display, there was enough illumination to spare that this logo had a warmly welcoming glow.

But it was still an extra layer that room had to be found for. As the MacBook Pro got ever more thin and light, the thinness won and the light lost. Shortly after that first 2016 MacBook Pro lost its lit logo, they all did.

But it's back

Curiously, one of the features of the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR models is that they are thinner. The screen, specifically, is significantly thinner enough to be called out by Apple as a selling point.

It's a feature of Apple using the tandem OLED display which dispenses with the usual backlight and extra layers of screen. Those layers made the screen clear, but they also meant more power was needed to make the display viewable.

And of course more layers meant more width. So by switching to tandem OLED, Apple has saved a quite remarkable amount of space. On the new 14-inch model, the screen is half a millimeter thinner, while on the 16-inch, it's almost a millimeter.

Despite achieving that thinness, Apple has chosen to reinstate the famous backlit logo. Perhaps it's again a function of the lit screen bleeding through, perhaps it was possible to do it without adding as thick a piece of translucent plastic and relying on the LED backlight as before.

But whatever the reason and however it was done, Apple has quietly called back to its distinctive past. It will now again be shining out from stages, and there will again be whole seas of lit Apple logos in classrooms and at events.

It wasn't the end of the world when the logo went, but if you were a longtime Mac user, you did feel it. So this is a good day.

And since the logo vanished under Tim Cook's watch, you have to wonder whether it's back because of John Ternus. He's not been CEO for very long, but he has been deeply embedded in the company's design teams for most of his time with the company.