i-am.ws

Brightness MacOS Ventura

My Mac Mini M1 from early 2023 came with MacOS Ventura 13.0. After connecting the HDMI to a monitor, the screen was very dark, hardly readable. However the Brightness control keys on the Apple "Magic Keyboard" (F1/F2) didn't work to adjust this.

So I opened System Settings -> Displays and noticed that the Brightness slider was absent. Browsing Apple-Communities I finally found a post from someone running 13.4 who had the same problem. After multiple calls with Apple Support a senior engineer finally told him that this was caused by a bug in Ventura on Mac M1's. And that there was no fix for it, that he had to wait for the next MacOS update.

After reading that, I upgraded my Mac Mini to "latest greatest" :) Ventura 13.6 and thought that that would solve my problems, but half an hour later still no Brightness slider. A further upgrade from Ventura to Sonoma is of course a possibility. Whether that will make the slider and function keys to reappear ... who knows?

Later I saw a post that mentioned that this bug relates to external displays. Therefore the Mac Mini issues. On a MacBook with Ventura, the built-in screen has brightness control, but an added external screen does not.

It's a shame that for seven MacOS updates Apple didn't fix this pretty evident problem !!

Posted at 02:28PM Feb 10, 2024 by WWWillem in Desktop  |