A pricey way to polish your Apple products

It works just fine, but the $19 Polishing Cloth serves more to show your loyalty to Apple than it does to clean your tech products.

Apple's $19 Polishing Cloth is like a parody of an Apple product: It perfectly exemplifies the concept of a brand premium. And unlike my college-favorite burrito place that offered a $50 menu item as a gag reference to its fine-dining ambitions, the Polishing Cloth is very real (and currently back-ordered until 2022). It was introduced alongside Apple's revamped MacBook Pro lineup earlier this year, and my cloth arrived well after the MacBook Pro I ordered at the same time. Its ridiculous price aside, the cloth works fine for cleaning dust, streaks, and fingerprints off of most devices, but some glass surfaces trip it up.

The Polishing Cloth certainly isn't the first overpriced accessory from Apple and likely won’t be the last. The most famous recent example is the Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit, a $699 set of four rubber wheels for its Mac Pro computer.

Apple isn't the only manufacturer that marks up the price of components, but its markups tend to be dramatic. For example, 32GB RAM chips for a 27-inch iMac cost $600 at Apple, but only $132.75 at longtime Apple retailer Other World Computing (OWC). A 2TB iMac SSD at Apple costs $600, but $409 at OWC. And yet, even with that expectation, Apple’s markup for its cloth (which costs roughly 32 times more than comparable products) seems particularly outrageous.

The Apple Cloth arrives in a slender box with a cardboard insert that proclaims that it is "safe for use on all Apple displays and surfaces." Specifically, this is the only cloth the company approves for use with the "nano-texture" matte panel on its $5,000 Apple Pro Display XDR and the optional $300 nano-texture add-on for last year's 27-inch iMac. Yes, I seriously question the pricing of this product, but if you're buying a monitor that costs several thousand dollars, a $19 cleaning cloth won't seem as outrageous.

On the back of the box, you can read a translation of "polishing cloth" in seven different languages. The German one, in particular, amuses me: "Poliertuch." While "tuch" definitely means "cloth" in German, it reminds me of the Yiddish word "tuchus," a word with a very different definition.

The cloth is gray and has two layers; a flatter edge around it holds the layers together. An embossed Apple logo sits in the lower right corner. The microfiber material reminds me of Microsoft's signature Alcantara. To my fingers, it's a little grippy and almost greasy, as opposed to cheaper cloths that feel textured or just soft. The different texture is presumably what prevents it from damaging those nano-texture monitors. I was a little disappointed to find my cloth had a wrinkle in it, but it smoothed out after I laid it flat for a while.

The Apple Polishing Cloth works better with phones and computers than with eyeglasses or glass tables. A quick, smooth swipe cleared away fingerprints on an Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max, a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, a 27-inch iMac, and a particularly greasy Huawei P30 Pro. It doesn't seem to clean Apple products better than non-Apple products, but then again, I didn't get the chance to test in on a nano-texture monitor.

Both jam and mayonnaise smudges on the iPhone 13 Pro Max took a little bit of work to clean: I picked up most of the mess with one side of the cloth and then polished the screen to a smudge-free shine with the other. The cloth continued to glide smoothly, but it picked up some oil from the mayonnaise stain. Apple says that you can hand wash the cloth with dish soap and water; after, it recommends that you let it dry for 24 hours.

I ran into some trouble when I tried cleaning my glasses with the cloth—it really dragged against what I'm pretty sure is the anti-glare coating. For comparison, the free cloth that Warby Parker provides glides much more easily. I experienced similar resistance when I tried using the cloth on a glass coffee table, possibly also because of a coating.

Microfiber cloths do not generally sell for $20. For comparison, you can get a pack of six highly rated Koala Cloths for $8. Amazon's AmazonBasics brand sells 24 cloths for less than $15. Even the ShamWow, of TV ad fame, costs only $8.

The Apple Polishing Cloth fully demonstrates the power of the company's branding—it doesn’t even matter that Apple's official page on how to clean your device suggests only that you use a "clean, damp, lint-free cloth." So long as Apple sells a product that fits the definition, fans will buy it.

We primarily rate products based on their utility and value. The Apple Polishing cloth has a lot of utility, but very little value (unless you have one of those rare nano-texture monitors). For tech completionists with disposable income, the experience is worth the $19. But everyone else should save their money.

It works just fine, but the $19 Polishing Cloth serves more to show your loyalty to Apple than it does to clean your tech products.

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PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed more than 1,100 smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 15 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks projects in the US and Canada, runs our Race to 5G tracker, and writes opinions on tech and society. Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite cities are Barcelona and Hong Kong. While he's a fourth-generation Manhattanite, he now lives in Queens with his wife and daughter.

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