A 58,000-yuan premium, down to just 3,000 in 48 hours. That money was never for the phone.
At 8 p.m. on October 16, Apple opened preorders for its first foldable, the iPhone Duo. People went wild.
Appleโs website crashed under the traffic. Every model sold out on JD.com and Tmall within a minute, and delivery dates were pushed all the way to January 2027. On Dewu, the 1TB black model was immediately listed for 79,999 yuanโ58,000 above the official price.
Three days later, scalpers were left listing them with messages like: โJust 3,000 extra, pickup on launch day. Please take it off my hands.โ
Offline buyers were even tougher, pushing offers down to just 2,500 extra.
From 58,000 to 3,000. A drop of more than 95%. In just two days. Nobody was biting.
Not a single yuan of that 58,000 was paid for the phone itself. It was all for the idea that โother people canโt get one.โ The premium wasnโt measuring demand; it was measuring certainty of supply. It was all expectation.
Apple itself shattered that certainty. Before launch, it urgently increased orders by 30%. Foxconnโs production lines had already been running for months, and each of the first batch of stores could get 20 or 30 units. The โimpossible to getโ story turned overnight into โactually, you can buy one.โ
A Zhengzhou dealer named Xu had locked in 50 units in advance, with a total bill close to one million yuan. Heโd put down a 25,000-yuan deposit.
His plan was to make 2,000 yuan per phoneโ100,000 yuan across all 50.
Early on October 17, his buyers lowered their offers twice overnight. The latest price had fallen below what heโd paid. If he sold, heโd lose 25,000 yuan. A real loss. He could only stop buying and start asking longtime customers if theyโd take the phones in batches.
I lined up the quotes from those three days. The sharpest collapse came in the 48 hours from the 17th to the 19th. Listing prices started out inflated, actual sale prices couldnโt keep up, and then sellers began undercutting one another in a rush to unload.
Is a first-generation foldable phone with no Face ID, no telephoto lens, and only eSIM support worth paying several thousand extra to โget it a month earlyโ?
We have our answer. It isnโt.
Scarcity comes in two forms. One is hard production capacity: Moutai canโt simply produce more, so thatโs genuine scarcity, and prices can hold. The other is channel-driven expectation: phones can be produced at any time, and scarcity is just the illusion that โI missed out on this batch.โ Once expectations soften, the premium collapses like a sandcastle.
Whatโs interesting is that this same dynamic plays out every day in crypto.
The first-day premium for a new coin measures the same thing. Not what the project is worth, but whether you can buy in during that first hour. Once the project team increases supply, the unlock schedule opens up, or the token gets dumped on an exchange, the premium immediately turns negative. It collapses. The reason people rush to subscribe to new token launchesโ
$BNB โis also that allocations are limited and winning odds are low, not because the new coin is inherently worth that price.
So whose pockets does the money end up in? The people who secured orders first, and those who listed at high prices earliest. The ones left holding the bag are dealers like Mr. Xu.
Anyone whoโs rushed to buy at launch can do the math. The extra you paid to โget it earlyโ is the same money as the 58,000 extra youโd pay for the phone.
Thereโs no telling yet whether prices will collapse again after the first customers receive their phones at the end of November. Production is still ramping up, and the queue on Appleโs website already stretches to March 2027. One signal says supply is increasing; the other says the wait is getting longer. The two signals conflict.
Bitcoin is at 82,000 today, up a little over one percent. Premium games like this in consumer electronics canโt move the broader market.
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