Apple Cut the Price of the Polishing Cloth in Half

Apple spent this morning raising the price of its cheapest desktop by 50 percent. It also released a new Polishing Cloth for $9, down from $19. The cloth is the only thing in the lineup that got cheaper today.

It's available now. Apple's product description is word for word what it was before: soft, nonabrasive material that safely cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture glass.

What actually changed

Nobody outside Apple knows yet. The price dropped by ten dollars and the copy stayed identical. It may be smaller than the original, or made differently, or the same cloth with a new price. Apple didn't say, and the product page doesn't list dimensions. Anyone claiming to know what's different is guessing until someone puts both versions on a desk next to each other.

Why anyone cares about a cloth

Apple launched the original in October 2021 at $19 and it sold out almost immediately, with waits running into months. The internet spent a year making fun of it. The joke was never really about the cloth, which is a perfectly good microfiber cloth. It was about paying $19 for one with a logo embossed in the corner.

At $9 the joke gets weaker, which may be the point. If you own a nano-texture display, Apple tells you not to use anything else on it, and a generic microfiber cloth can leave the etched glass looking hazy. That narrow case is the one where this purchase makes sense.

Should you buy it?

If you have a nano-texture Studio Display, Studio Display XDR, or MacBook Pro, yes. Nine dollars is cheap insurance against scratching a screen that costs four figures to replace.

For a standard glossy screen, a two-pack of microfiber cloths from a camera shop costs less and works the same. Apple's version is nicer to hold and has a logo on it. That is the entire difference.

One footnote for collectors: the original $19 cloth is still floating around on Amazon at the old price, which means you can now pay double for the discontinued version of a cleaning rag.