Unless you take extraordinary measures, you’re probably not getting your hands on an iPhone Duo for the remainder of this calendar year. There’s a whole constellation of reasons for this, and according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, one bright star in that formation is that sharp-elbowed scalpers—as well as non-scalping consumers—are using AI agents to jostle for advantage.
As Gurman phrases it, “scalpers and other buyers are using AI-powered bots to monitor Apple’s website and snap up newly available inventory for in-store pickup within seconds.”
Before the iPhone Duo went on sale, one Redditor asked the iPhoneDuo subreddit if Meta’s Muse was a good tool for a job like this, only for commenters to essentially pelt them with rotten vegetables. “Thanks for all the replies! I’ll steer clear,” reads an edit on the original post. Gurman’s reporting suggests agent-happy users found a way anyway.
One result: resellers on Reddit literally can’t believe their luck. A nervous Redditor who says they received double the retail price for an iPhone Duo on eBay asks, “does anything about this seem suspicious?” The comments are reassuring if you’re an iPhone scalper. Yep, people pay those kinds of prices, it seems.
This product release is a perfect storm for scalpers. The Duo went into production amid a memory shortage, one factor that helped drive it to the status symbol price floor of $1,999. But Bloomberg reports that Apple also opted for a rollout plan that kept supply way below demand—dripping the phones into stores all over the world in October, rather than waiting until November, and concentrating firepower on the mega-markets of the U.S. and China.
During the Duo’s release weekend, Gurman says Apple put 80% of its available Duos on store shelves, and set aside 20% for shipments and in-store pickup—which is what’s being gamed 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 consistently waiting outside Apple Stores in the early morning, Black Friday-style, presumably because robots can’t do that yet.