supply chain strikes again —
Delays may drive people to buy inferior third-party polishing products.
Andrew Cunningham
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Enlarge / If you wanted to polish your Apple products, bad news: you’ll need to wait at least a month to get Apple’s Polishing Cloth.
Apple
Between ongoing supply chain issues, chip shortages, and pent-up demand, Apple’s new MacBook Pros were always going to be hard to get. They’ve been up for preorder for less than 24 hours, and if you order one now, you probably won’t get it before November or December.
But the new laptops aren’t Apple’s only in-demand product: The shipping times for Apple’s $19 microfiber Polishing Cloth have also already slipped back into mid to late November. Unfortunately, this means that your compatible iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, and iPods will need to remain unpolished for at least a month. It’s unclear whether the delays are being caused by low supply, overwhelming demand, or some combination of both.
The Polishing Cloth, folded over in a visually appealing manner. Without testing, we can’t say whether the Apple logo is cosmetic or if it meaningfully improves the polishing experience.
Apple
The Polishing Cloth boasts support for an impressive range of Apple products, which Apple lists out in detail on the Cloth’s product page. The list includes iPhones as old as 2014’s iPhone 6, every generation of Apple Watch, and even the old iPod nano and iPod shuffle. Without testing, however, we can’t confirm whether the Polishing Cloth will adequately polish older unsupported devices or non-Apple gadgets like Android phones or the Nintendo Switch.
The Polishing Cloth isn’t a new Apple product—it has shipped with the company’s $5,000 Pro Display XDR since that monitor was released back in 2019. But this is the first time that Apple has offered its best, most premium polishing experience to the users of its other devices.
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Listing image by Apple