So, Apple — the trillion-dollar company that once told you that you were holding your iPhone wrong — has done it again. In what might be the most gloriously unnecessary support document in the history of human civilization, Apple has published official instructions on how to clean its $19 polishing cloth. Yes. A cleaning cloth. That needs cleaning. With its own dedicated support page. On the internet. For free. Unlike the cloth.

Let’s back up a little, because context matters here. Apple sells a polishing cloth for $19. Nineteen American dollars. For a piece of fabric roughly the size of a large coaster. It’s made from “soft, nonabrasive material” — which is Apple’s poetic way of saying it’s a microfiber cloth dressed in a turtleneck. The cloth was originally designed to clean Apple’s elite nano-texture displays found on products like the Pro Display XDR, the Apple Studio Display, and the MacBook Pro — screens so expensive and so delicate that wiping them with a paper towel is probably a federal offense. At some point, Apple decided regular humans should also be able to buy this cloth standalone, and thus, the $19 polishing cloth was born, internet memes were made, and tech journalists everywhere collectively lost their minds.

Now, here’s where it gets beautifully, cosmically absurd. The whole point of a cleaning cloth is, as you might reasonably expect, to clean things. But what cleans the cleaner? What wipes the wiper? Apple, in its infinite wisdom, eventually answered this profound philosophical question on its official support page — and the answer, brace yourself, is dishwashing soap and water.

According to Apple’s official support documentation, cleaning the polishing cloth requires exactly three steps. Step one: hand-wash the polishing cloth with dish soap and water. Step two: rinse thoroughly. Step three — and this is the part where you pour yourself a stiff drink — allow the polishing cloth to air dry for at least 24 hours. Twenty-four hours. A full rotation of the Earth. One complete cycle of a human sleep schedule. Half a work week. All so your $19 cloth is ready to wipe a smudge off your $1,599 MacBook Pro display.

Let that sink in. You spent $19 on a cloth. The cloth got dirty doing the one job it exists to do. So now you must hand-wash it (not machine-wash, not dishwasher, not a quick rinse under the tap — hand-wash, like it’s a cashmere sweater you bought at a Milanese boutique). Then you have to wait an entire day before you can use it again. As PCMag rather brilliantly pointed out, if you’re the kind of person who wipes your Apple displays every single day, you’re going to need a second polishing cloth — which means spending another $19 — to cover the 24-hour drying window. Apple’s ecosystem: you love it, you hate it, and sometimes it costs you $38 to keep your screen dust-free.​

Now, the support page doesn’t specify which brand of dish soap you should use — which feels like a missed upsell opportunity if you ask us. Apple could have very easily released a $29 “Apple Dish Soap” in a matte white bottle with a minimalist label, and people absolutely would have bought it. But no, for now, any standard dish soap appears to be approved by Cupertino. Consider yourself free to use whatever’s under your kitchen sink, though we’d recommend not telling Apple that you used the generic store brand. It seems like the kind of thing that would void a warranty somewhere.

The cloth itself, in its primary role — before it becomes an object that needs its own spa treatment — is actually meant for some pretty serious business. On nano-texture displays like the ones found on the Pro Display XDR and the Studio Display (which, by the way, starts at around $1,599 just for the display, monitor stand sold separately because, of course, it is), Apple specifically warns that only the included polishing cloth should be used for regular cleaning. For those stubborn, hard-to-remove smudges that a mere dry cloth cannot vanquish, you’re allowed to slightly moisten the cloth with a 70-percent isopropyl alcohol solution — but only infrequently. So not only does the cloth have its own care instructions, but it also has a regulated usage policy for when it can and cannot be moistened. This cloth has more rules than most apartments.

For context on just how seriously people take this little piece of fabric: when Apple launched the polishing cloth in October 2021, it promptly sold out for weeks. People were waiting in virtual queues to buy a cleaning cloth. There were shipping estimates of 10-12 weeks. For a cloth. Reviewers at How-To Geek, who actually spent $19 and put it through rigorous testing against an iPhone, an iPad, and even a non-Apple Surface Duo 2, found that dry, the cloth pretty much just “smushes stuff around the display” rather than actually cleaning anything. Their verdict was, quote, “it doesn’t even CLEAN! It had one job!” The internet, naturally, agreed.

And yet, here we are. Apple’s polishing cloth remains listed on the Apple Store, it ships to most countries, it has hundreds of reviews, and Macworld named it one of the best cleaning accessories they’d ever tested. Someone at some point got it for as low as $7 on a sale, which felt significantly more emotionally reasonable than $19. Reddit users have admitted to just tossing it in the washing machine and air drying it — an act of rebellion against Apple’s hand-wash mandate that probably keeps Apple engineers up at night.

The bottom line from Apple’s own support page is deceptively simple. Dish soap. Water. Rinse. Twenty-four hours of drying time. That’s it. That’s the entire document. Three bullet points that Apple felt necessary to publish as official technical documentation alongside troubleshooting guides for macOS and iOS software bugs. It’s the support page equivalent of a Michelin-star restaurant publishing instructions on how to wash their napkins. Does it need to exist? Debatable. Does it exist? Absolutely, and we are all richer for it.

If you lose your Apple polishing cloth, don’t panic — you can order a replacement directly from Apple’s website or Amazon. It costs $19. You probably already knew that. And now you also know that when the replacement gets dirty, you’ll need dish soap, water, some patience, and apparently 24 hours of your life to get it back in fighting shape. Welcome to the Apple ecosystem. It’s very clean in here.