I personally think that this is all a charade. Apple most likely preselected top developers for this conference. This is a conference with a non-disclosure agreement. Given how secretive Apple is, they probably wouldn't want to tip off competition.
Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
81–90 of 108 posts
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with a cheap Lotto is it levels the playing field TOO much, everybody and their mother who has any interest at all even considering going to the event will put their name in the hat, why not? Now, people who make their living for themselves or are representing a multi-million dollar company have to compete with hobbyists or really anybody who just wants to hang out I'd prefer a solution that scales the co…
Or perhaps more conferences? Geez back in the Microsoft heyday there were many different conferences. Sure, the PDC had 20K attendees if you wanted to go to that but there were other smaller conferences as well. Hell, I'd settle for an east coast conference so I don't need to hang out with the skinny-jeans hipsters :)
More or bigger. Allowing for 20,000 attendees would be huge for WWDC. Currently there are only 5-6,000 tickets available. I imagine it would probably still sell out at 20,000, but it would be a lot less crazy, at least.
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one on one with apple developers can actually be very much worth the 1600 alone.
For some, yes. Not for everyone.
The networking opportunities are worth it for anyone who even thinks they might want to do this professionally. The sessions are the second least interesting thing about the conference. (The least interesting thing being the free "food".)
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#84When are they going to move to a bigger venue? This is crazy.
Why would they do that? Selling out in two minutes makes them look good, and the limited number of slots make the attendees feel like they're special.
Why did they have so many tickets available back when it wasn't selling out, if this is such a good idea?
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#85Respectfully: this demonstrates that Google IO isn't selling out quickly just because of the toys...
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#86Anyone else get this screen in Chrome? http://cl.ly/image/2E2a1y0u1g0N By the time I pivoted to Safari one minute later it was sold out.
Who designed that screen? Where's the fail whale?
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly don't think the problem is how you portion out the tickets. The system you describe does not seem to be any better at getting the tickets in the right hands. I'm not so concerned with the unfairness of the current system, but with the fact that many of these tickets will be completely wasted. The real problem is that they've combined a 1 hour media event with a developer conference. So many people every ye…
The building is packed all week. I don't think that keynote-only attendees are a significant factor here. If the two were separated, then maybe it would have sold out in 80 seconds this year instead of 70 seconds. Big deal. The imbalance between the number of people willing to pay $1600 for the conference and the number of tickets available is so enormous by this point that there's simply no way to make it fair. It d…
So one interesting thing is that the "two disparate events, one conference" problem goes a little deeper. There seem to be four "things" you get out of WWDC:
1. Meeting with people (can be achieved without a ticket and just going to SF that week)
2. The sessions (many of which are recorded and thus largely don't require a ticket, but some are not I think?)
3. The keynote (not actually important for developers)
4. 1-on-1 with engineers. As far as I can tell the only truly unique and universally considered valuable aspect of the conference that absolutely requires a ticket.
So it seems that (4) is the real value here, probably more to do with the fact that its so hard to get developer help from Apple any other time of the year. Since you mention radical changes, I wonder if it would be worth it for Apple to just prerecord ALL sessions, make them all available after a Keynote that has nothing to do with the conference, and then offer a WWDC week that just focused on direct contact with engineers. This would actually be better for the sessions too: many times I've had a question about a session, and either there wasn't time to answer it then, or I didn't think of it until much later. By having a conference full of people that had plenty of time to review content beforehand, you'd probably get more questions answered.
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#88 Apple’s tickets sold out 95 percent faster than Google’s tickets
WTF kind of statistic is this? The measure of two tech giants is how ludicrously quickly they sell out tickets to their conferences?
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too.
Same thing happened to me and I just got off the phone with Apple support - they are saying that this has happened to a lot of customers and since it is a "developing story" they can not provide a lot of details. They did say however that if you made it to the checkout process your ticket was in fact reserved and once they get things sorted out they will e-mail you at your Apple ID to allow you to actually purchase y…
I had a ticket in my cart and then got an error when I tried to actually buy it. I hope you're right!
Re: Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
#90Is the world becoming a smaller place? Google I/O has been impossible to get into the last couple years selling out in minutes, now WWDC too.
But it is not just dev conferences. As an avid runner I've run a number of races every year. Recently a number of them have gone from selling out 12K slots in months to hours. In grad school classes filled up in seconds as well when registration opened.
This is a manifestation of our JIT culture. No longer do you mark the registration date in your calendar. No, now your call family and friends and have everyone raring to go at 11:59 PM before registration opens. If you're keen, you might probe their API and reverse engineer the site to get a jump on others.
Now that everything is in the ether, there is no concrete queue. You can't get there early if you're diehard. It is simply the roulette wheel of HTTP errors that determines who gets what today.