Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side

The article explores the unique keyboard designs that Apple produced for various markets, with a particular focus on the Canadian and Japanese iterations. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Apple released beige PowerBook keyboards for Germany, conforming to local laws that mandated specific color and contrast combinations for keyboards to minimize glare and ergonomic issues. Likewise, Apple produced white keyboards with distinctive symbols for parts of Canada in the same period.

These Canadian keyboards featured symbols for Control, Alt, Tab, and Caps Lock that differed from those used in Europe. Even the Enter arrow was distinct between the US and Canadian editions. Moreover, the numeric Enter/Return key had a different shape, and the symbols for Num Lock and Escape were also unique. It is unclear whether these keyboards were sold throughout Canada or just in its French-speaking region.

Apple's Canadian keyboard design is known as the CSA or ACNOR keyboard. The symbols on these keyboards were part of the Unicode standard, appearing as ⇬⇭⎆⎈⇱⇲⎗⎘. The author speculates that Apple may have complied with government pressure to create these unique keyboards, which bore unsightly icons that clashed with the company's overall design aesthetic.

The article also discusses Apple's Keyboard Layout for Japan, which included a distinctive Control key with a pencil symbol. This symbol was not a result of any standard but was unique to Apple's design. The Control key with a pencil was used in conjunction with Kotoeri, a system developed by Apple to facilitate smooth typing in Japanese across multiple writing systems.

The Kotoeri implementation, however, was discontinued by 2014, and Apple replaced the pencil symbol with a standard Control symbol in their user interface. The author notes that the pencil symbol on the Japanese keyboard was Apple's invention, which may have been a consequence of the complexities of Japanese typing.