Apple says to clean its fancy $19 Polishing Cloth with ... dish soap

Apple Polishing Cloth
Apple Polishing Cloth (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • Apple's $19 Polishing Cloth has been the breakout hit of the last 12 months.
  • The Polishing Cloth is the only way to clean the nano-texture Pro Display XDR.
  • Apple has shared how to clean the cloth itself and it's insanely easy.

Apple's insane $19 Polishing Cloth is the only way Apple says nano-texture-endowed Pro Display XDR owners can clean their monitors so you could be forgiven for expecting it to need special treatment. But as it turns out, it doesn't — you just need to throw some dish soap at the thing and get right back to cleaning.

Apple has a support document that's designed to tell people how to clean the aforementioned Pro Display XDR and nestled at the bottom of that is a section all about cleaning the cloth itself. It was spotted by 9to5Mac and it's simplicity in itself.

Clean the polishing cloth

  1. Hand wash the polishing cloth with dish soap and water.
  2. Rinse thoroughly.
  3. Allow the polishing cloth to air dry for at least 24 hours.

That last part seems fairly important for obvious reasons, so please do make sure that your Polishing Cloth is nice and dry before waving it anywhere near that gorgeous Pro Display XDR. Or anything else, for that matter!

The Polishing Cloth might be the best iPhone cleaning solution around, but it's still a hard sell. Not that you'd be able to tell that if you'd been trying to get hold of one of late. It's only recently that delivery windows for the little cloth have begun to get a little more reasonable!

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.