Search any Mac forum for "lowest keyboard brightness" and you'll find the same complaint, repeated for years across models: the dimmest setting macOS allows is still noticeably bright in a dark room. It started with M1 MacBook Air threads and it's still being posted about on M3 and M4 machines today.
If that's what brought you here: you're not imagining it, it's not a defect in your machine, and there is a fix at the bottom of this page.
Every Apple Silicon MacBook enforces a software floor on keyboard brightness. The slider's lowest position isn't the hardware's lowest brightness. The backlight controller supports dozens of dimmer steps below that point, but macOS clamps anything lower, and the only remaining option is fully off.
The floor also isn't identical across models. Differences in the backlight hardware and Apple's calibration mean some machines have a minimum that feels reasonable while others sit at a level that's borderline unusable next to a sleeping partner or on a night flight. That's why you'll see people swear their old Intel MacBook went dimmer than their new one: for many model pairs, it did.
We built Midnight Keyboard because of those forum threads. It's a small menu bar app for Apple Silicon MacBooks that unlocks 10 brightness levels below the macOS floor. The lowest is roughly 20 times dimmer than Apple's minimum: the key legends are readable in a pitch-black room without casting a glow on anything around them.
There's a short setup guide in How to Dim Your MacBook Keyboard Backlight Below the Minimum, and if you want to know why the floor exists at all, read Why Apple Won't Let You Dim Your Keyboard.
Free 3-night trial, no account required.
Download Midnight Keyboard$7 one-time to unlock after trial. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon only.
It works on every Apple Silicon MacBook Air and MacBook Pro (M1 through M4) running macOS 14 or later. Intel Macs use a different backlight path and aren't supported.