The mouse, and therefore the mouse cursor, was invented by Douglas Englebart, and was initially an arrow pointing up. When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow.

4] Disable the Hide pointer while typing option. If your mouse pointer changes to an arrow with a vertical scroll bar while typing, disabling the Hide pointer while typing option can fix the problem.

My best guess is that if Apple ships an iPad keyboard with a trackpad this spring, it’ll be able to drive a text-editing cursor or, if you turn it on, the Assistive Touch accessibility cursor ...

In addition, the reason the arrow is tilted to the left can be attributed to the fact that the click position is easier to calculate, because the origin of the cursor’s bitmap is in the upper left.

My friend, age 81, suffers from wet macular degeneration resulting in reduced peripheral vision. Her particular problem is the inability to always see, follow and locate the cursor arrow.