Apple Wants $19 For a Cleaning Cloth

Say hello to Apple's latest innovation, a polishing cloth that costs $19. For almost $20 plus shipping this off-white cleaning cloth can be yours to have and hold. Why is it so expensive? According to the overview, Apple's Polishing Cloth is Made with soft, nonabrasive material, the Polishing Cloth cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture glass, safely and effectively."

According to Apple's store front, the Apple Polishing Cloth is compatible with pretty much everything Apple sells. What's in the box? One Polishing Cloth. What are the dimensions of this $19 piece of fabric? The website doesn't say and Apple didn't immediately return Motherboard's request for clarification on the issue.

What Apple is describing is a microfiber cloth, which can be bought at any electronics store or auto parts store for a fraction of what Apple is charging. I could walk into a Best Buy or Walmart right now and grab a few for less than the cost of lunch. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find one stuffed at the bottom of that drawer full of cables you'll never organize or tucked away in the box one of your devices came in.

The $19 Polishing Cloth is just another in Apple's long line of pricing innovations. The iPhone 12 didn't come with a charging brick, you had to pay about $20 for it. If you wanted a VESA mount for its $5,000 Pro Display XDR, that would run you about $200. Wheels for the $6,000 Mac Pro? That'll be $700.

It's hard to say if the $19 Polishing Cloth can compete with a pack of six microfiber cloths I once bought for $5 at the checkout line of a Fry's Electronics. On the upside, it has a nice little Apple logo embroidered in the corner, just to remind you what you're paying for.