Every iPhone launch is different in its own way, but the release of the iPhone 6/6+ will be remembered for the small army of ethnic Chinese that camped out in front of Apple stores across the U.S. to get it early. (See Where China’s grey market hits the sidewalks of New York.)
A window had been opened — an opportunity for iPhone arbitrage — by Apple’s unexplained delay in offering the new phones for sale in the world’s biggest market for mobile phones, one with a special fondness for jumbo sized phablets like the iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple sold a record 10 million iPhone 6s that first weekend. Untold numbers were flown to Hong Kong and smuggled into mainland China where, it was hoped, they could be sold for a nice profit to the growing population of rich Chinese willing to pay a fat premium for the latest thing in high tech. (See Tales from the iPhone 6 grey market.)
The arbitrage window closed early Tuesday when China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that it had approved the new iPhones for sale. According to Reuters, MIIT had assured itself after “rigorous scrutiny” that the new phones did not have a security backdoor through which Chinese state secrets could flow.
At midnight Pacific Time, Apple announced that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus would be available in China for pre-order Friday Oct. 10 and sale on Oct. 17.
The gap between the retail price and the grey market price, which started to narrow last week, snapped shut overnight, I imagine. Unless they’d already managed to unload their haul of imported iPhones, somebody just lost a bundle.
The irony will not be lost on those Apple fans who complained two weeks ago that the party atmosphere in the iPhone queues was spoiled this year by a lot of grumpy Asians who slept on cardboard and didn’t speak much English.
Whatever. The fans got their iPhones. The grumpy line sitters got their commissions. And at least some of their paymasters did not.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
