When Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro series went up for presale in mainland China at 8pm on September 12, the result was a familiar script: total meltdown, sold out in seconds.
Across major Chinese e-commerce platforms, including JD.com, Taobao and Apple’s own site, the most popular models were marked out of stock within a minute. Apple’s official website and Apple Store app briefly buckled under the traffic, throwing up error messages before recovering roughly six minutes later.
On social media, the phrase “couldn’t get an iPhone 18” shot to the top of Weibo’s trending list, with users complaining they kept refreshing the page only to find stock gone by the time it loaded. Some tech livestreamers in Shenzhen broadcast themselves on Douyin racing to snag a unit the moment sales opened.
In Beijing, meanwhile, Apple’s retail stores drew crowds over the weekend eager to try the new phones in person, but walk-in purchases weren’t an option. When I asked at an Apple store near where I live, staff told me the only way to buy one was to reserve online.
New Apple phones are almost always priciest at launch, with prices easing over time. On Chinese resale platforms such as Xianyu, iPhone 17-series units have already seen the steepest markdowns, even as iPhone 16-series phones, further back in the product cycle, remain surprisingly strong sellers.
Any hot new tech product tends to pull forward a wave of what might be called advance consumption: buyers who might otherwise have waited another six months to upgrade instead move up their purchase because of the launch buzz, limited supply and the pull of being among the first to own one. Presale numbers, in other words, mainly prove that day-one demand is intense, not that sales will stay strong for months to come.
The more telling question is what happens once the initial batch, absorbed almost entirely by that early rush, gives way to normal supply, and whether market enthusiasm cools off quickly once it does.
Once the first wave of stock disappeared, buyers desperate to get a phone immediately turned to third-party platforms. Data from the resale app Dewu shows the average transaction price for a burgundy iPhone 18 Pro Max with 256GB of storage hit 12,799 yuan, a 16.4 percent markup, or 1,800 yuan, over the official price. The silver version in the same configuration went even higher, averaging 13,999 yuan, up 3,000 yuan, or 27.3 percent. Higher-capacity models saw similar premiums, with some 2TB units marked up by more than 3,200 yuan.
Scalper networks had already begun buying up units and offering “purchase assistance” services before the presale even opened, charging anywhere from 299 to 599 yuan per order, with some using automated scripts to place bulk orders. The price gap between mainland and Hong Kong versions widened the arbitrage opportunity further.
