A customer looking to purchase an Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) M5 Max MacBook Pro used OpenAI’s $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro subscription to find a significantly discounted price through an overseas retailer.
The buyer, identified on Reddit as “Altruistic-Dust-2565,” asked the AI chatbot to locate all available purchasing options for a specific high-end MacBook Pro configuration at a lower price than Apple’s official store.
ChatGPT Pro returned a link that appeared to display a pre-price-hike figure, initially leading the Redditor to suspect the AI was hallucinating outdated or fabricated information.
On closer inspection, the buyer discovered that a seller on China’s JD.com had simply forgotten to update their listed price following Apple’s recent round of price increases.
The configuration in question features an 18-core CPU, a 40-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory, a 2TB SSD, and a nano-texture display, currently listed at $7,149 on Apple’s official U.S. storefront.
The Redditor placed an order immediately after confirming the listing was legitimate, receiving the laptop within just eight hours of completing the purchase.
The buyer noted: “I immediately placed the order, and within 8 hours I had my brand-new MacBook for about ¥43,000 (~US$6,329), while the official Apple China Store charges ¥57,124 (~US$8,408), and the cheapest unofficial sellers are around ¥49,000 (~US$7,212) because of import taxes and such.”
That puts the total saving at more than $2,000 compared to the official Apple China Store price, and well over $800 cheaper than any other unofficial seller the buyer could locate.
An unusual additional finding from the Redditor’s search was that downgrading from 128GB of unified RAM to 64GB and removing the nano-texture display option actually resulted in a higher price, not a lower one.
Apple’s recent price hikes caught consumers and industry observers off guard, though this case illustrates how pricing inconsistencies across global retail platforms can occasionally create unexpected opportunities for cost-conscious buyers.
