I’m completely, incurably obsessive-compulsive.

It’s not that I need everything extremely neat — or maybe I do. Anyway, I’m obsessed with keeping white things white, apart from keeping refrigerator doors closed, rubik cubes solved and charts perfect. It’s a disease.

Anyway, owning a pretty white Macbook has thrown my otherwise structured life into an abyss.

I keep fighting the urge to clean it every single minute, because every minute speck of dust just glares out like some challenger trying to drive me insane. I want to scrub it into a pristine state, but it would take constant cleaning and gloved hands to achieve that.

So what to do?

I sought out a few forums on how to keep the Macbook clean, and found a very good solution: Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. You can’t use it on the shiny shell (it’ll scratch the hell out of it) but it works like, well, magic on the matte finish inside. Personally, I use it to clean the wrist area — it’s totally horrible, the effect human wrists have on a Macbook’s white finish.

So here’s a sample of how it works. See the pictures I took before and after the cleaning. Notice Jim Sturgess on my screen? Don’t let that distract you from the matter at hand. Check out the before and after images below:

See the difference? Can you see the black marks on the wrist area of the first picture? That’s the problem I’m talking about. Now see how Mr. Clean Magic Eraser fixed that. If I hadn’t tried it myself I probably wouldn’t believe it, but it does work. It can be pretty abrasive, though, so easy on the scrubbing. A few swipes should to the trick, followed by a dry flannel cloth to get rid of the grime.

Try it yourself.

Tags: apple, jim sturgess, macbook, mr. clean