As far as I can tell, the last time Apple manufactured a keyboard with this symbol on it was 2007 with the A1243.
Does anyone know why this is the symbol, and why Mac OSX consistently shows a symbol which appears nowhere on any of their (recent) keyboards?
Speculation: it comes from the symbol of (electric) changeover switches: the user can choose whether current goes up or down.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Computer-Keyboards/What-is-the-origin-of-the-Macs-option-key-symbol-%E2%8C%A5" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Computer-Keyboards/What-is-the-origin-o...</a>
Looks like the Apple Lisa had this symbol on its standard keyboard (sans the word option), meaning it's been in use since at least the early 80's.<p>I would wager that this was the first use of the symbol to denote this purpose.<p>Interestingly enough, the symbol hasn't been widely explicitly mentioned in menus in Apple's OS until relatively recently (OS X). Option was always that special easter egg of a key that half of Mac users still never used or realized existed.
My MacBook Air (2012) and Apple Wireless Keyboard do, in fact, have this symbol right below the "alt" label so I wouldn't say they "appear nowhere on any of Apple's recent keyboards."
Somehow you ended up at AskHN instead of Ask Jeeves. Did you bother to search for this before asking HN?<p>When I searched google the first link is:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Computer-Keyboards/What-is-the-origin-of-the-Macs-option-key-symbol-%E2%8C%A5" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Computer-Keyboards/What-is-the-origin-o...</a><p>You can probably find some more links here:<p><a href="http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+the+origin+of+apple%27s+option+key" rel="nofollow">http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+the+origin+of+apple%27s+option+...</a>