Your monitor's brightness, on your keyboard.

macOS will not touch the brightness or volume of a third-party monitor. Macdials does, from the menu bar and from the keys you already use.

See pricing Why another one of these

It tells you when it cannot help

This is the part every other app gets wrong.

When a monitor will not answer, the usual behavior is to quietly start dimming the picture instead, with a dark overlay. The backlight never changes, the screen still puts out the same light, shadow detail is crushed, and nothing anywhere says so. It reads as brightness control being broken.

Often the real cause is a setting on the monitor itself, and it takes about fifteen seconds to change. Macdials names it: which monitor, what it said, which menu item to look for, and the picture-mode settings on your particular brand that block it. Then it checks again while you stand there.

What it does

Brightness and volume

Real DDC/CI commands to the monitor's own firmware, so the backlight actually changes. Contrast and input source too.

Your keyboard's keys

The brightness and volume keys reach whichever display your pointer is on. Hold shift and option for fine steps, the way macOS does everywhere else.

Presets

Day, Evening, Night, or your own. Set your displays how you want them and save it in one click.

Schedules

Apply a preset at a time, or relative to sunrise and sunset. No location permission: you type a latitude once.

Its own on-screen display

Macdials draws its own, so it keeps working on macOS 26, where the one every other app borrows now shows an empty bar.

Remembers through sleep

A monitor that loses power overnight comes back at its factory brightness. Macdials puts it back where you had it.

Knows your monitors apart

Displays are identified by what they are, not which port they are in, so two identical monitors keep their own settings.

Quiet

It reads a monitor when you ask it to, never on a timer. Nothing to see in Activity Monitor.

Nothing leaves your Mac

No analytics, no accounts, no network calls. Your license is checked offline.

Next to the others

Prices checked September 2026.

	Macdials	MonitorControl	Lunar	BetterDisplay
Brightness, volume, contrast	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Says why a monitor will not respond	Yes	No	No	No
Presets	Yes	No	Paid	No
Schedules	Yes	No	Paid	No
Its own on-screen display	Yes	No	No	Yes
Daily use capped	No cap	No cap	100 a day free	No cap
Still being built	Yes	Declared end-of-life	Yes	Yes

Pricing

One time. Every Mac signed in to your iCloud account. Free 14-day trial, no account, nothing to cancel.

Only if you want the next major version when it ships. The version you bought keeps working, and your key never stops being valid.

That second line is deliberate. A competitor decided that licenses bought before a cutoff date no longer unlock the current major version, and people who had paid found out when they reinstalled. Macdials will never invalidate a key you paid for.