Wait, what? That's completely wrong.

There are four modifiers on a Mac keyboard: command, option, control, and shift. (Fn isn't a real modifier, but it likes to hang out with them on laptop keyboards.)

Option is also sometimes labeled "alt".

Command usually has a four-leaf-clover symbol on it, and sometimes also has an Apple logo on it. You might also hear it called "open-Apple" by people who remember the Apple II, which had open-Apple and closed-Apple keys which mapped to the joystick buttons.

All four of these modifiers have been on all of Apple's keyboards for over 20 years. (Control, the newest one on the scene, appeared on the Apple Extended Keyboard in 1987.)

Thanks, but it's not so much the correct answer to the question that concerns me, but why there needs to be a question at all.

If the key is labelled alt, call it alt, if it wants to be called steve, then have the documentation refer to it as steve.

It's a keyboard. It shouldn't be this complex.

I agree. Calling the command key apple is falling out of use though. Most people these days call it command or use the cloverleaf symbol, and it says command and has the cloverleaf symbol on it. People have started calling option alt and I'm not 100% sure why that's so, but they key says option and alt, so it shouldn't really be confusing (except that some people might think you hold Fn to make it alt instead of option, or something like that).

Glad to know I'm not alone. The Macbook keyboard only has the text 'alt'.

Oh, must be a recent change. I don't like that they removed the text on the arrow keys as well. They used to say page up/down and home/end since fn-left is home, fn-right end, fn-up page up and fn-down page down. That's not obvious to switchers from any other OS.

I get that they want to be all zen and remove unnecessary stuff but some of this stuff is necessary. Not good for users.