Rome wasn't built in a day, and the same is true of desktop operating systems. The modern versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux we know and (sometimes) love today represent decades of iteration and overhauls, but much of that legacy is invisible. New design languages and interfaces show up every few years, and in the process, old applications and designs are covered up or replaced.
It doesn't take long to find legacy holdovers in today's Windows 11—for example, that Windows 3.1-era file picker is still hanging around. The macOS platform is a much different story, as Apple frequently rips out or redesigns core system components. You can't even (natively) run games or applications more than a few years old on a modern Mac, so finding components undisturbed for decades is a rarity. Even the built-in Chess game got an update recently.
However, there is one place where PowerPC processors, Apple's Newton PDAs, and other relics of Apple's past are still present in modern Mac computers: the Apple Symbols font.
Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003, and one of its many improvements was a new system font called Apple Symbols. It included many common Mac and Apple symbols in a standard TrueType font with Unicode characters, so they could be easily used across Mac applications and documentation. Apple now provides the SF Symbols library as the main way for Mac applications to use common system icons and animations, but the original font is still there.
The current version in macOS Sequoia 15.1 includes 4400 glyphs, with the copyright information listed as "© Copyright 2003-2006 by Apple Computer, Inc." I have Mac OS X Panther on a partition on my PowerMac G3, and I pulled that font version for comparison—it has 1224 glyphs.
Many of the glyphs in the Apple Symbols font are general purpose icons, corresponding to standard Unicode characters, but there are some Mac-specific images. The font has several variations of the Apple logo, as well as icons for a generic floppy disk, Sony's trademark for high density ('HD') floppy disks, SCSI, Ethernet, ADB (the primary data connection on Macs before USB), and AppleTalk.
There are also references to the Apple Newton, the company's PDA lineup that launched in 1993. The Newton platform was killed off in 1998, as one of many consolidation efforts initiated after Steve Jobs returned to the company. The font has two variations of the lightbulb Newton logo, as well as the system icons for undo, extras, dates, and names.
We can also find a Mac help icon that resembles the original Macintosh, the wristwatch that was used as a wait cursor in classic Mac OS, and a FireWire icon. The next release of macOS is dropping support for FireWire, but perhaps it will stick around in this font. There's also a pattern of four diamonds that presumably represents Boot Camp, the software Apple made for Intel-based Macs to boot into Windows.
It's also pretty fun to see the stylized logo for PowerPC, the CPU architecture used by Mac computers from 1994 until 2006. Even though PowerPC was not widely used in desktop computers outside of Apple products, it found some success in game consoles like the Wii and PS3, and it powered the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars. PowerPC lives on as the Power ISA architecture, primarily in servers built by IBM.
The old icon for QuickTime, Apple's multimedia framework, might be my favorite discovery in the font. It's not just an old logo, it's the original QuickTime logo that was replaced in 1994 by the more recognizable blue Q. I'm not sure why Apple decided in 2003 to preserve the original design in a system font library, but it's fun to see either way.
One more interesting group of icons to highlight: there are some symbols for monitor output and adjustment, including one for degaussing a CRT screen as a magnet with a cross through it. Apple released its final CRT monitor in 2000.
If you have a Mac, you can check out the Apple Symbols font by opening the Font Book application, searching for Apple Symbols and selecting it, then scrolling past the preview to the Repertoire section. Windows has similar collections of retro icons spread across various system libraries, but it's more surprising that Apple hasn't cleaned out its symbols.
Thanks to Nederlandstalige TeX Gebruikersgroep for an old guide that explained some of the symbols!