iFixit teardown confirms the $19 Apple cleaning cloth is a repairability disgrace

Those of us in the tech world take iFixit’s repairability analysis pretty seriously. So, when a brand new Apple product gets the lowest repair score possible, we take notice.

That’s exactly what happened with Apple’s infamous polishing cloth, a $19 piece of fabric you use to clean your Apple devices before placing it back into a glass display case surrounded by invisible lasers to ward off big-money thieves. The fine folks over at iFixit actually did a real teardown of the cloth as part of its larger breakdown of the new MacBook Pro.

Well, as real as a teardown of a bit of fabric can be, anyway. The main takeaway here is that it’s actually two pieces of cloth that you can rip apart. That might increase the product’s value by virtue of multiplying the amount of usable cloth by two, but it also reveals its biggest problem: You can’t piece them back together. As such, iFixit gave it the shocking repair score of zero out of 10.

Yikes.

In the context of the larger MacBook Pro teardown, this is obviously a big goof and shouldn’t be taken as a serious, scathing criticism of Apple’s business practices. We just want to applaud iFixit for taking the effort to perform a product teardown of some cloth. If there is any real insight to be found here, it’s that you probably shouldn’t spend $19 on it. You’ll probably have a hard time getting your hands on it, anyway.