Apple quietly put a new version of its Polishing Cloth on sale on Tuesday 25 August 2026 at $9 in the United States, down from $19. Apple issued no press release for it, and has not said whether the new cloth is a different size or made differently. It repeats the same description as before, a soft nonabrasive material safe for any Apple display including nano-texture glass.
That happened on a day when Apple raised the Mac mini to $899 from $599 and raised the top Mac Studio by $200.
A running joke
Apple first gave the cloth away in 2019, bundled with the Pro Display XDR, a $5,000 monitor whose optional nano-texture glass has a delicate etched coating that ordinary cloths can scratch. In October 2021 Apple began selling it separately for $19, alongside the redesigned MacBook Pro.
The mockery was immediate, and it sold out anyway. The New York Times reported on 29 October 2021 that the cloth was Apple’s most back-ordered item that month, with waits running into months, and called the pricing bold even by the company’s standards.
The $19 figure was not arbitrary. The Wall Street Journal noted that every Apple product has a starting price ending in 9, a retail technique called charm pricing, where a 9 reads as better value than the round number above it.
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With this reduction, Apple has given no explanation and you can’t expect anything. It’s a cleaning cloth.
But it’s also a time when nano-texture glass is no longer exclusive to a $5,000 monitor. It is now a paid option on the iPad Pro, the iMac, the MacBook Pro and the Studio Display.
Is Apple’s Cleaning Cloth Worth Buying?
For most screens, no. A 12-pack of microfibre cloths costs under $9 on Amazon and will clean a normal glass display perfectly well.
. The Mac mini is Apple's small desktop, an aluminium box roughly 5 inches square that ships without a screen, keyboard or mouse. You supply those, which is why it has been the cheapest way into a Mac for two decades. The design is unchanged this generation. ## Where the $899 comes from The previous Mac mini launched in October 2024 at $599 with the same 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. We [covered that launch](https://tech-ish.com/2024/11/04/m4-mac-line-up-apple-refresh/) at the time, when the M4 Pro cost $1,399. In May 2026 Apple dropped the $599 version, brought it back in late June at $799, and pushed the M4 Pro to $1,599, [changes tracked by MacRumors](https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/mac-mini/). So the same specification has gone from $599 to $799 to $899 in under two years, a 50 percent rise on a machine whose whole pitch is being the affordable Mac. [AppleInsider calls $899](https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/25/m6-mac-mini-arrives-in-ram-and-ssd-constrained-environment) the highest starting price it has ever had. The original 2005 model was $499. ## Why the price went up On its earnings call on 30 July 2026, chief executive Tim Cook told analysts: "we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. We did it because we're in what I would characterize as a 100-year flood on the memory pricing." The [full transcript is public](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/08/07/apple-aapl-q3-2026-earnings-call-transcript/). Three companies make almost all the world's memory chips: Samsung, SK hynix and Micron. Since late 2025 they have moved factory capacity towards the specialist memory AI data centres buy, where margins are higher, leaving ordinary memory scarce. [TrendForce reported in July](https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20260703-13134.html) that contract prices would rise another 13 to 18 percent in the third quarter of 2026, after jumps of roughly 60 percent in the quarter before. Apple's finance chief Kevan Parekh told the same call that memory costs explained more than 100 percent of the company's sequential fall in profit margin. The same pressure is expected to hit the iPhone 18, covered in our [piece on iPhone pricing in Kenya](https://tech-ish.com/2026/08/02/iphone-18-split-launch-kenya-prices/). ## What you get The M6 has a 12-core processor and 12-core graphics, with a dedicated AI accelerator in every graphics core. Apple claims up to 4 times faster AI work and 2 times faster graphics than the M4 Mac mini, on its own July 2026 tests. It is also the only M6 tier Apple plans to make, since it is skipping the M6 Pro and Max to bring the M7 forward, as our [piece on both chips explains](https://tech-ish.com/2026/08/25/apple-m6-m5-ultra-chips-explained/). Base memory stays at 16GB and base storage at 256GB, so the extra $300 buys speed rather than capacity. The M5 Pro model gets Thunderbolt 5, the fast port standard used for external drives and displays, and can be linked to other Mac minis to run large AI models locally. The M6 keeps the slower Thunderbolt 4. Both gain Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5Gb ethernet, and both run macOS 27, which brings the rebuilt Siri that Apple [showed at WWDC in June](https://tech-ish.com/2026/06/02/wwdc-2026-siri-ios-27-cook-last-keynote/) as an English-only beta later this year. Apple said in February that Mac mini production would come to the United States for the first time, at a Houston plant, and Cook confirmed in July that assembly starts there this year. Apple [opened a training centre at the site on 13 August](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-opens-advanced-manufacturing-center-in-houston/). ## What this means in Kenya Apple has no store here, so the machines arrive through authorised resellers and importers on their own timelines. At about KES 129.45 to the dollar on 24 August 2026, $899 converts to roughly KES 116,000. Nobody will pay that. Computers enter Kenya at zero import duty, but a 2.5 percent import declaration fee, a 2 percent railway development levy and 16 percent VAT all apply, and VAT is charged on top of the other two. With air freight, our working estimate puts the landed cost near KES 150,000 before any shop takes a margin. The outgoing M4 Mac mini sells locally from about KES 89,000 at [iTey Store](https://iteystore.co.ke/category/mac-mini-m4-m5-in-kenya-apple-desktop-computers) to KES 137,000 at [Price in Kenya](https://www.priceinkenya.com/product/113317-apple-mac-mini-m4). Early Kenyan pricing on new Apple hardware runs high and then falls. The MacBook Neo landed at KES 130,000 against a $599 list price [in March](https://tech-ish.com/2026/03/25/macbook-neo-price-in-kenya-alternatives/), and iPhone 17 prices [dropped sharply three months after launch](https://tech-ish.com/2025/12/30/iphone-17-iphone-air-prices-in-kenya-go-down-crashing-just-3-months-later/). So wait for stock to settle rather than paying the first asking price. If your current Mac still does your work, nothing in the memory forecasts suggests a cheaper Mac mini next year. The thing to watch is whether Kenyan resellers list the M6 before the 22 September shipping date.](/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Apple-M6-and-M5-Ultra-hero-260825_big.jpg.large_2x-390x220.jpg)
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