Image source: Jason Michael, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 License

Most keys on a key­board make intu­itive sense, even to a novice com­puter user, since nearly all of them are labeled with either famil­iar sym­bols (such as let­ters or num­bers) or with rec­og­niz­able words (enter, delete, escape). The Apple key, how­ever, has no famil­iar sym­bols beyond the com­pany logo, a mark whose mean­ing on some­thing that you press is unclear. Also on that key, the pres­ence of a sec­ond, even less-meaningful mark -- the so-called “pro­peller” -- and the lack of a writ­ten label add to user confusion.

Try explain­ing basic user inter­face tasks to any­one new to the Mac, and you’ll see what I mean. You can refer to it as “the Apple key,” which is descrip­tive, but the apple sym­bol has no on-screen sig­nif­i­cance. The pro­peller mark does appear on-screen, but only the Mac-initiated know that pro­peller means com­mand. As a result, the Apple key is now called the com­mand key, but that wasn’t always the case.

Having won­dered about this glar­ing usabil­ity flaw for years, I was excited to dis­cover this inter­view with mem­bers of the Lisa devel­op­ment team from the February 1983 issue of Byte Magazine. The Lisa was Apple’s short-lived, yet ground­break­ing pre­de­ces­sor to the Macintosh. In the inter­view, Larry Tesler, who was in charge of the Lisa’s appli­ca­tions soft­ware, explains how the Apple logo ended up on the keyboard:

[In a pro­to­type ver­sion of the key­board] you saw two keys that said Command on them. The new ver­sion has only one, and instead of say­ing Command it has a pic­ture of an apple on it. The rea­son is that the key’s used as a short­cut to choose a menu com­mand. If you look at a menu, on the right you’ll see this lit­tle apple sym­bol and a letter.

Image source: DigiBarn, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

If you hold down the Apple key and the let­ter, you get the com­mand. We couldn’t find any way to sym­bol­ize the Command key that would fit nicely in a menu and be rec­og­niz­able to peo­ple. We tried and tried. Finally we decided that the apple looked nice and had a nice sound to it -- “Apple X,” “Apple R” -- and it keeps Apple in the mind of the user instead of “con­trol” or some­thing else. It’s a sym­bol that every­body using this machine will rec­og­nize instantly, so we decided to put it on the key as well as on the screen.

The Macintosh project “bor­rowed” many user inter­face con­cepts from the Lisa team (who, in turn, had bor­rowed from Xerox’s Star), includ­ing the inno­va­tion of asso­ci­at­ing key-combination short­cuts with graph­i­cal menu items. But the Macintosh aban­doned the Apple sym­bol in its menu short­cuts in favor of a geo­met­ric, propeller-like shape that rep­re­sented “com­mand.” Although the new abstract sym­bol is even less mean­ing­ful to the unini­ti­ated, it makes more sense as visual short­hand than the company’s logo. For almost the entire his­tory of the Macintosh, though, this key has been marked with both sym­bols, even though the Mac’s on-screen UI always referred to it as “com­mand” and never “Apple.”

Only in the last year or so has Apple dropped the ves­ti­gial logo from the com­mand key, start­ing with the new alu­minum key­board (below) as well as on the MacBook. The word “com­mand” or at least “cmd” has been added, too -- some­thing that should have been done 24 years ago.

Image source: Declan Jewell, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License