Apple's Pro Display XDR Can Only Be Cleaned with Special Apple-Provided Cloth
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Do you read the manual when you buy a monitor?
They're all pretty much the same and work out of the box, especially an Apple monitor. I can see a lot of people just setting up the monitor and tossing the manual. When they see the cloth, all they think is "cool, free cloth".
Also, you have to educate anyone who would think to clean or touch the monitor screen in your absence, like cleaning staff, significant others, your kids, visiting relatives, or whatnot.
Unless there's a huge warning sticker on the plastic that usually comes over the screen, I wouldn't even think that there was special care required.
Of course, that's assuming I'm setting up the monitor myself. In an office environment, it might not be set up by the actual user, and the user might not be given the manual or know about any special care requirements.
The only reason why this special cloth even made the headlines and why it's a hot topic for discussion is because it is considered an outlier from a care perspective.
Because in an office all it takes is one cleaner or coworker to not know to leave that display alone and they could damage your expensive display.
Anecdote: Our state capitol dome was being renovated. Involved slowly sanding off 150 years of accumulated lead paint with respirators. Tedious, hot, cramped work.
They were told under no circumstances to use a torch (the usual way of removing layers of heavy paint) to melt the accumulation off. Because of very dry wood etc, it was a fire hazard.
During lunch break, one new guy thought that was silly, got a torch, went back up to try it and prove to everybody it was really the best way.
Of course, the wood heated up, the shredded-cellulite insulation inside the wall caught fire.
We lost the entire capitol dome to the resulting conflagration. (The well-meaning worker survived).
So, even intelligent creative people (especially so maybe) can do dumb things. Because they think they know better.
Presumably, Apple didn't use this fragile coating just for the heck of it. They chose this coating because it was the only way to make this monitor to perform in the way they wanted. Should Apple have just made a worse monitor because the coating is fragile?
(BTW, we don't know what will actually happen if the screen is cleaned improperly. The monitor won't necessarily become an instant piece of junk.)
This isn't a regular display. It's a super-expensive professional instrument. The only people buying this are going to be photo editors, Hollywood people, graphic artists, etc.
To me, it makes more sense to include or offer a dust cover (presumably lined with the same material as the special cloth) to put on it when it's not in use.
Just set a screen saver that says "Don't touch me"
Besides, who actually uses screen savers these days? Don't most people turn off their monitors or put them in energy saving mode at the end of the day?
They typically empty out wastebins and attend to the bathrooms.
Makes it easier to clean and protects the paint
I can tell you that if I bought one of these monitors, I wouldn't have read the manual, and I would have thought of the free cloth as one of those "nice little touches" that always comes with buying an Apple product.
If I was buying the monitor after seeing the headline, I would probably try to find a safe dust cover to put over the monitor when not in use to help prevent avoidable mishaps from someone being a little too enthusiastic about cleaning my work area.
Off-topic: am I alright using a screen cleaner like Woosh! on the MacBook Pro or should I go totally dry?
It's (probably) just Apple trying to sell fantastically overpriced cleaning cloths.
Does it scratch when touched?
Is it a little bit durable?
"Pro" classed gear usually is more durable than consumer grade products.
Totally understand the need to take special precautions.
I know there's no easy alternative to ad-based revenue models for news, but it's led to such lazy and low quality "reporting" that is so obviously focused on getting clicks above anything else.
So while I think it's fair to question why the base model Mac Pro exists, I understand the price given the (specific) hardware it contains. You're paying an Apple Tax on top, of course, but if you don't think macOS adds additional value you should be looking elsewhere.
I really think most of the people complaining about the Mac Pro's price want it to be something it's not. I understand the desire for a consumer-level, upgradable Mac desktop, but that's not what Apple set out to create with the Mac Pro.
You have to compare apples-to-workstations.
The Dell Precision 7920 I am wasting my company time on right now was more than $10k. Most PcMaStErRaCeRs would comment that they could throw together some aliexpress parts and "beat" it but my workflow won't... flow with less than 768GB of RAM and I can't guarantee (within comfortable margins) that my output is correct unless it is run on a Quadro RTX-- with 32GB of memory.
But yeah, a pee-cee can get more eff-pee-esses in Doom.
A firm that is processing several million dollars worth of data on a workstation doesn't really care, within reason, about the price of the workstation.
The cost of catering for some of the projects that these workstations will be working on will vastly exceed the price of the workstations, and you poop out the catering at the end of the day while the workstations keep on workstationing.
And if my Dell breaks? A guy will drive for over an hour to where I'm sitting and put a brand new one on my desk before the end of the business day, and he'll swap out the drives. Try that with stuff from pcpartpicker.
I don't know what applecare does for the Mac Pro, but if they start carrying them in stores I'm willing to bet you'll be able to walk in with a broken one and walk out with a fixed one.