Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

Over 10 million iPhones were sold during the first weekend after Apple Inc debuted its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models. And it received 4 million pre-orders on the first day of release, breaking its previous sales record. Photos and videos of hundreds of people spending the whole night to wait for the release of the new models outside Apple stores have gone viral online. According to the Huffington Post, at the Apple flagship store on the Fifth Avenue in New York, more than 90 percent of the people queuing up were Chinese, among whom more than half of them were dama, or middle-aged women, who are determined to buy the phones for profitable resale to their contacts on the mainland. It seems that dama will play a critical role in the iPhone consumer market after already wielding influence upon the gold market amid a sluggish economy.