What do people ask about XDR brightness on a MacBook Pro?

Yes — 3 days at full strength, and you do not have to do anything to start it. Download the app from this site and the trial begins the first time you open it: no account, no card, no key to paste, nothing to sign up for.

When the 3 days are up, the app does not lock you out and does not stop. Instead the app keeps boosting part of your screen, and that part gets smaller week by week, so you keep seeing the difference between the part that is boosted and the part that is not, every day, on your own screen. Buying a licence gives you the whole screen back immediately. There is nothing to cancel and no account to close, because you never made one — and until you buy, the app never contacts our servers at all.

The Mac App Store version has no trial. A paid app on the App Store is bought before it is downloaded, so there is nothing to try first — that is Apple's model, not our choice. The trial is in the download on this site.

Two choices: 9,99 € a year, as a subscription that renews automatically until you cancel it, or 49 € once for a licence that never renews and has nothing to cancel. It is the same app either way, with the same features, on the same three Macs.

On the yearly licence, cancelling is one step from the link in your receipt and you do not have to tell us why. Cancelling stops the next payment and nothing else — the licence runs to the end of the year you have paid for, and after that the app stops boosting until a licence is active again. Nothing is deleted and your settings stay where they are.

There is a 14-day refund on both, no questions asked, and the trial above costs nothing at all.

Because keeping this app working is the work. macOS changes how displays are handled every year, and it has already broken the mechanism once: gamma tables stopped being applied on the M5 Pro and M5 Max, and we had to block those models rather than sell into a failure. We put the odds that the technique breaks, or that Apple makes the category unnecessary, at roughly 65 to 75 per cent within five years.

That is the product's nature, and the yearly licence is what pays for the maintenance it needs. We would rather say that than pretend a display hack is a finished object you buy once and forget. If you would rather take that risk yourself and never think about it again, the 49 € lifetime licence is exactly that trade — five times the yearly price, paid once.

It uses the same brightness range macOS already drives your panel to when you play an HDR video — nothing beyond it. The app adjusts the display's gamma ramp through CGSetDisplayTransferByTable, a public Core Graphics function, and holds a tiny transparent window open so macOS keeps granting the display its extended range. Both are ordinary, documented macOS behaviour.

What we have not done is a long-term panel study, and no honest developer has. If your Mac already shows HDR video for hours at a time, this puts the panel under the same load, no more.

Yes — a brighter screen costs power, and we will not pretend otherwise. We have not yet measured the draw with an instrument, so we do not publish a percentage.

The app ships with a battery guard: pick a threshold between 10 % and 50 % and the boost switches itself off below it, and comes back when you plug in. Closing the lid also releases the boost.

No. Everything it touches is public and documented: Core Graphics gamma tables for the brightness curve, a 1×1 pixel EDR trigger window for the headroom, SMAppService for launch at login, IOKit power sources for the battery guard.

This matters for two reasons: private frameworks break on macOS updates, and they are rejected by the Mac App Store. For comparison, Vivid's binary links against DisplayServices, which is a private framework.

It works on MacBook Pro models with a Liquid Retina XDR display — the 14-inch and 16-inch machines from 2021 onwards — plus the Pro Display XDR.

We are deliberate about the difference between measured, supported and known to be broken by macOS. One model has actually been measured on a bench so far, and we say which. The compatibility page lists every model in those three columns.

Because macOS 26.3 broke the mechanism on those chips, and we would rather refuse than take your money for something that cannot work.

On Mac17,6, Mac17,7, Mac17,8 and Mac17,9, gamma tables are still stored correctly at the Core Graphics level but are never applied to the display pipeline. It is not specific to us: the same defect hits f.lux, MonitorControl and DisplayCAL. It is documented on the Apple Developer Forums (thread 819331) and filed as FB22273730, FB22273782 and FB23444164; all were still open in August 2026. The M5 without Pro or Max is not affected.

macOS restores your display immediately — it resets the gamma table when the owning process dies. We measured that at under 19 ms after kill -9.

There is a limitation you should know about, because it is ours to own: when the app quits it also clears gamma adjustments that other apps had made, such as f.lux, because macOS falls back to the ColorSync profile rather than to the previous table. Every app that touches the gamma ramp has this problem, which is an explanation and not an excuse. It is on our list.

On an Apple Pro Display XDR, yes. On ordinary external monitors, no — there is no extended range to unlock, so there is nothing to do.

We have not yet confirmed the boost on the Studio Display XDR, so we do not claim it.

It raises the whole tone curve, so whites and light tones get brighter. What it will not do is flatten your highlights.

The boost factor is capped by a ceiling computed from the headroom your panel actually reports, so the curve cannot be pushed past the point where the brightest tones would collapse into a single value. That is a structural property of how the factor is chosen, not a setting you have to get right. What we have not published is a colorimeter ΔE measurement of the result, and we will not quote one until we have taken it.

Because reference mode gives the display zero headroom, on purpose. Reference presets such as HDR Video (P3-ST 2084) pin the panel to a defined white level so that what you grade is what someone else sees.

Low Power Mode does the same thing for a different reason. In both cases there is nothing to unlock, and the app tells you so instead of pretending to work.

Three things: the boost is capped by your panel's real headroom instead of a fixed multiplier, it reaches full brightness faster than either of them, and it tells you what it could not verify.

We publish the measurements rather than the adjectives — compared with Vivid and compared with BrightIntosh, including the parts where they are ahead.

Not to run day to day, but yes, now and then. The app confirms your licence with our server every 45 days, in the background. You are not asked to do anything and there is no dialog to click.

Between those checks it works offline — on a plane, in a cabin, on a firewalled network — for up to 180 days, and says nothing at all for the first 105 of them. We would rather say the awkward half plainly: if the app cannot reach us for longer than 180 days, the boost stops until it can. It comes straight back the next time the check succeeds, and you never lose your key.

None of this happens during the trial. Until you enter a licence key you have bought, the app never contacts our servers and we store nothing about you — no identifier, no installation count, nothing.

The check carries your licence and a one-way pseudonym of the Mac it is running on. It does not carry your name, your email or anything about how you use the app. The privacy policy lists exactly what we store.

Nothing about you and nothing about how you use the app: no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no account. Your settings stay in macOS user defaults on your own machine.

There is one thing the app does send, and it is the licence check. When you activate, and every 45 days after that, the app asks our server to confirm your licence. It sends the licence and a pseudonym of the Mac — a one-way hash, not a serial number, not an account, not anything we can turn back into you or your computer. We store which pseudonyms a licence has been activated on, so that a licence covers three Macs rather than the whole internet. During the trial even that does not happen: the app never contacts our servers and we store nothing about you — no identifier, no installation count, nothing.

This website carries no tracking scripts. The privacy policy says all of this at greater length, including how to have the activation record deleted.

Yes — 14 days, no questions asked, on either licence, on purchases made directly from us. Better still, try it first and you never have to ask: the download is the full app and it costs nothing until you decide.

Purchases made through the Mac App Store are refunded by Apple, under Apple's own process, because we never see that transaction. The terms cover both cases.