Typing the Apple Symbol

After seeing my post how to type the command key / cloverleaf symbol, someone asked for a similar post how to draw the Apple symbol.

As a digression, this is a story I heard. In the early days of Apple, when Susan Kare was designing icons for the first Macintosh operating system, they used the Apple symbol on the keyboard command key, so she put the Apple symbol in all the menus for keyboard shortcut. When Steve Jobs saw this, he something to the effect of "Apples everywhere, too many apples!"

Look now in the File or Edit menu of your Mac, and see all the keyboard shortcuts there. Imagine if these were all Apple symbols! Now you can imagine why SJ was taken aback.

So Susan Kare looked for a distinctive but non-threatening symbol, and she found the cloverleaf symbol in a book of symbols used on Swedish maps to indicate a point of interest while traveling.

Anyway, beware how you use the Apple symbol. As a solid symbol, instead of an outline, it can be imposing. In an HTML document (web page), you can type the Apple symbol by adding this HTML entity to your code:



It should look like this:



If you need to type the Apple symbol into a word processing document or other document on your Mac, the keyboard shortcut is Option-Shift-K.