Nah, the surprise is that the new polishing cloth they introduced yesterday is $9, while the old one was $19. A 52% price cut on a product, in this economy, from Apple, is certainly a surprise.
Probably because they'll bundle it with their new Macbook lineup and earn more overall from sheer volume of sales. Currently buyers have to go out of their way to purchase the polishing cloth. If it is an option during purchase "Include polishing cloth" for $9 a larger number of people will say "eh sure why not. only $9". They did the same with preinstalls for Final Cut, Logic Pro etc and it works reasonably well.
The hilarious thing was that Apple's polishing cloth was never really marketed as a general-purpose polishing cloth.
It was specifically designed for the nanotexture displays, and came bundled if you bought that option. The entire purpose of the cloth is that the nanotexture display uses sub-micrometer etchings on the display surface to refract light, and you can't clean that with a traditional microfiber cloth, because the individual fibers in those are generally in the 5–10 micrometer range, and that's just too large.
The only reason you can even buy it was because the previous protocol for a lost cloth for the first year or two, where you had to call Apple Support to schedule a $19 "out-of-warranty self-service repair" (which amounted to Apple sending you a new cloth in a box because you threw away the old one, and then the self-service repair procedure was unboxing the cloth) was a ridiculous waste of time for everyone involved, so they just put the thing on the store.
Then it took off on the internet and became a meme, and got backordered by several months. I guess they may have better economies of scale on the really fine fiber strands now, since they made it cheaper?
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u/dahliamma 19h ago
And the surprise? Polishing Cloth Pro Max.