Unless you take extraordinary measures, you probably won’t get your hands on an iPhone Duo for the rest of this calendar year. There’s a whole constellation of reasons for this, and according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, one shining star in this formation is that sharp-elbowed scalpers — as well as non-scalping consumers — are using AI agents to jostle for advantage.
As Gurman says, “Scalpers and other buyers use AI-powered bots to monitor Apple’s website and grab new inventory available for in-store pickup in seconds.”
Before the iPhone Duo went on sale, a Reddit user asked the iPhoneDuo subreddit if Meta’s Muse was a good tool for a job like this, only for commenters to essentially bombard them with rotten vegetables. “Thanks for all the responses! I’ll stay away,” an edit to the original post read. Gurman’s report suggests that happy agent users still found a way.
One result: resellers on Reddit literally can’t believe their luck. A nervous Redditor who says he received double the retail price of an iPhone Duo on eBay asks: “Does anything about this seem suspicious?” The comments are reassuring if you are an iPhone scalper. Yes, it seems people pay that kind of price.
This product release is a perfect storm for scalpers. The Duo entered production amid a memory shortage, a factor that helped drive it to the status symbol floor price of $1,999. But Bloomberg reports that Apple also opted for a rollout plan that kept supply well below demand, releasing the phones to stores around the world in October, rather than waiting until November, and focusing its firepower on the megamarkets of the United States and China.
Over the Duo’s release weekend, Gurman says Apple made 80% of its Duos available on store shelves and set aside 20% for shipping and in-store pickup (which is the case with AI bots) and even then there were only “50 to 250 units per store.” According to Gurman’s sources, flesh-and-blood humans are constantly waiting outside Apple Stores early in the morning, Black Friday-style, probably because robots can’t do it yet.
Gn tech
