iPhone 18 Pre-Sale Day: Apple's Store Crashes, and China's AI Chatbots Become the Checkout
When pre-orders for the iPhone 18 opened in China on Friday night, Apple's own storefront buckled under the traffic — while ByteDance's AI assistant Doubao let users buy the same phones with a spoken sentence, and Huawei's costlier tri-fold went on sale the same morning.
At eight o'clock on Friday evening, the pre-sale for Apple's iPhone 18 series opened across China — and the country's biggest Apple storefront stopped answering. Shoppers who timed their click to the hour found the Tmall flagship store's pages replaced by an orange television icon and a notice reading "too many visitors, please try again later"; those who got further found ¥9,999 product pages stamped "cannot purchase, sorry, this product is currently out of stock." "Don't even want to talk about it," one user who had waited at the counter wrote, alongside screenshots of the failure — "went straight in and it crashed, I'll just wait patiently for October." Apple's launch has been trending in China all week — the new foldable iPhone Duo was dissected here when it was announced — but Friday was the day the phones actually went on sale, and demand outran the shelves.
The scene played out differently inside a chatbot. Doubao, ByteDance's AI assistant, had spent the week advertising a standing allocation of first-batch iPhone 18 Pro stock inside its own app. From 8 pm, users could say "help me order an iPhone 18 Pro Max" to the assistant, and it would raise a purchase card — model, color, storage, delivery address, payment — with the order completing through Douyin Mall. The pitch, posted under the trending hashtag "grabbing the first Doubao iPhone 18 Pro stock," promised independent inventory that ships within 48 hours, twelve interest-free installments, trade-in credit, and an "AI selection adviser" that recommends a configuration before you buy. Weibo's own assistant offered a similar flow. The technology columnist Lu Shihan called the move the visible edge of a shift worth watching: AI assistants moving from being an entrance to information to an entrance to transactions. If it catches on, the path from "which model should I buy?" to "bought" gets very short — and it runs past Apple's own storefront, not through it.
The same morning, Huawei put its answer to the iPhone on sale: the Mate XT 2 Ultimate Design, a tri-fold that opens left and right "like wings spreading," as one hands-on post put it, with a back panel woven in a gold-brocade pattern and a camera ring cut from a gem-like glass into 33 facets. Prices start at ¥19,999 — roughly double the top iPhone — and the official launch poster carried the release time to the minute, 10:08 am. By evening, buyers were asking each other in the comments whether anyone had actually gotten a unit, in the tone of people comparing lottery tickets.
There is a consumer-culture footnote that struck Chinese readers too: on Baidu's board, where more than a million pre-orders for the Duo were reported, the top discussion item was that ¥15,999 — about $2,250 — was being called cheap, a word rarely applied to Apple's flagships in China since the company raised prices here. Between a crashed storefront, a chatbot checkout and a ¥20,000 foldable, Friday's sales ritual offered a compact picture of the world's most competitive phone market: whatever Apple does, the ways to buy — and the phones to buy instead — keep multiplying.