
Just note that the illuminated keys no longer adjust themselves at all, so if you notice the negative consequences of the battery, you may want to set the brightness to the lower end. This may sound a little contradictory, but disabling the auto-lighting feature gives you complete manual control over the backlit keys, allowing you to set the brightness level you want to use all the time and stay consistent regardless of external lighting sensors or not. Now you have to use the F5 and F6 keys to manually control the key backlight level, this becomes the only way lighting works.
Deselect the Automatically illuminate keyboard in low light check box. Open System Preferences from the Apple menu and go to the Keyboard panel. You can manually control the keyboard backlight using System Preferences, and then use the F5 and F6 keys to adjust the backlight intensity: Sometimes the sensitivity problem can be solved with solution # 3 below, but another solution is to use only manual backlight controls and stop the automatic lighting adjustments. Sometimes adjusting the position of your MacBook isn’t enough, and I’ve had experience with a few particularly stubborn MacBook Air keyboards whose backlight simply doesn’t respond well to external lighting conditions. Solution # 2: Manually control the key backlight Prevent a bright light source from hitting the camera area and re-illuminate the keyboard. Simply shine a flashlight or bright light near the FaceTime camera at the top of the screen, and the backlit keyboard goes dark. If you’ve never experienced this for yourself, you can test it pretty easily, even in a raven-black room. This is a feature, not a bug, it’s designed to turn off the backlight automatically when it’s not needed and still not be visible, like when using your MacBook outdoors in the sun. The solution to this is simple enough: adjust your Mac so that the bright light source no longer shines on the screen and near the front camera. In some situations, direct lighting, bright lights, sunlight, or glare can shine directly on the light sensor on your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, and when that happens, the light indicator and controls lock. Solution # 1: Adjust the Mac and light sensor