[fsckboy]

>the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh

the first macintosh was very late to the party, there had already been GUI cursors for about a decade at PARC, and cursor styles had settled down to some standards.

in the early days of GUI cursors on relatively low resolution displays (by today's standards), an important issue was to reduce the amount of calculation and squinting the human had to do to identify the hotspot so you could accurately select/swipe what you wanted to. the tilted arrow cursor points right at its hotspot quite effectively even if the tip pixel is blurred, as does the i-beam (whose vertical offset is not as important to know accurately) the five fingered hand for moving bulk selections also does not require accurate placement, although I think the hotspot is at the end of a finger.

early GUIs let you edit your own cursors and hotspots.