Apple iPhone 6
IN PHOTO: Apple's iPhone 6 are displayed during a news conference by Customs and Excise Department and the police in Hong Kong September 21, 2014. Reuters/Bobby Yip

Was it the phone or the suitor's fault? That question begs to be answered after an unattached male Chinese programmer spent 500,000 yuan to buy 99 iPhone 6s online on Singles Day in China to convince the woman he was wooing to marry him.

Unfortunately for that chap, the woman still rejected his marriage proposal even if he spent an amount equivalent to 17 years the average wage of an ordinary Chinese worker to win her heart.

Not even the physical arrangement of the phones into the shape of a heart and a bouquet of real blooms could make the woman say "Yes," reports The Telegraph.

YouTube/CrazyGirl

The Guangzhou IT expert's financial loss was Alibaba's gain as the transaction was one of the estimated $8 trillion Singles Day sales expected to be generated on 11/11, a holiday for unattached Chinese with sales higher than the total sales generated by Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

It is also what made former school teacher Jack Ma, who started Alibaba in a garage, become one of the richest men in China as the number of participating merchants grew a thousand fold from the 2009 Single Day when there were only 27 sellers to 2014's 27,000 retailers.

If the heartbroken programmer got a hefty discount because he bought the phones online on Singles Day, there are speculations he would sell them at an even lower cost if only to get rid of 99 high-tech reminders of an embarrassing moment in his life.

Maybe the girl wasn't an Apple fan and was nationalistic that she preferred a made-in-China smartphone sold by local brands Xiaomi or Huawei, or she is an Android fan who favours gadgets made by Apple's competitor in Seoul, Samsung.