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WWDC Sells Out In 2 Minutes; Ticket On eBay 45 Minutes Later
alphadogg writes "The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference sold out in just two minutes today, blowing away last year's record of two hours. Tickets went on sale today at 10 a.m. PDT, as was announced yesterday, when Apple said its event would be held June 10-14 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Apple WWDC runs neck-and-neck with the annual Google I/O event in the race for hottest tech show. The Google event, slated for May 15-17 at Moscone Center, sold out in 45 minutes this year. While transferring tickets for WWDC is generally not allowed, an ambitious eBay seller is attempting to get $10K for the $1,600 ticket."
So can someone maybe get a leak of the attendee list so I can write a script that eliminates them from all my social media platforms?
I already have a plastic iPhone. It's called a 3GS.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The hallway time is the reason to go. Some of the sessions and labs get your in person with the leads of most of the teams and its not unheard of for app developers or companies who have issues to vent them there and see software updates in the future reflect those problems. The sessions they post online for everyone, but the hallway time and closed discussions are absolutely worth the cost of 1-2 tickets, not to mention you are not just talking about Apple here, but Google comes and pretty much every major developer is there.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
And not fanboys?
(For reference, I remember being an actual Apple Developer, and receiving the monthly CDROMs with amusing titles)
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The session videos are usually available the next week. Occasionally I'll write some app to automate some task on my mac, and I've really enjoyed watching the videos in previous years. Definitely stuff for nerds;)
Having hands that one of my kids once told me resembled bear paws... oversized and clumsy, something about the same size as the Galaxy S3 would be ideal for my purposes, because I've always found the iPhone display to be unusably tiny for anything involving complex interactivity (such as texting, for instance).
Puny human iPhone make Hulk sad.
I do remember them having some freebies and stuff at previous ones
They give you a track jacket and that is IT. The track jacket does not have pockets. One year the did give away a nice, if simplistic, backpack. Unlike many other conferences there are no vendors, hence no other free stuff.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what the point is if you already know how to use the APIs and don't have a problem reading about upcoming changes online.
There are a few points of value that have diminished. The first is that the WWDC sessions have usually a lot of good demos about HOW to use the new technology, which is quite a lot more useful than just reading about the raw API. The second was that people used to ask questions after the presentation, which was not on the video - that was done away with last year though, which is a real shame as the questions were often full of insight about the technology and potential issues.
But since as noted they stopped taking questions, and you can also see the videos a week later that reason is not as prominent (though it doesn't hurt to be a bit ahead of the curve).
schmooze your way into Apple employees' good graces?
That's not really a reason to go as it will not do much for you. But what is still valuable there is that you can talk to Apple engineers directly responsible for the different frameworks across the iOS API. These labs took some time to get to someone who was really one of the primary developers, but when you did reach them it could be very useful to find the answer to some deep problem.
It's also useful just to talk to other developers there, pretty much anyone who is there is usually pretty knowledgeable and has worked on some interesting stuff.
It's also good to take a solid week off work and just think about upcoming changes to the API and direction Apple is going,
Also on a side note WWDC usually has some pretty cool lunchtime speakers, last year for instance J.J. Abrams and Neil Armstrong were speakers (different days), for a few years they had a guy from Pixar with a really good talk. It's not a reason to spend some effort and $1600 on a ticket, but it is a nice break.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
sell the pants on eBay for $10,000
While transferring tickets for WWDC is generally not allowed, an ambitious eBay seller is attempting to get $10K for the $1,600 ticket."
Trying to sell something to Apple users at 6 times the value instead of the usual 3 is ambitious indeed.
The WWDC isn't really for you to just learn the new APIs. It's about being able to interact with some of the Apple engineers that wrote the new APIs. Like your opinion about how the audio ones are written. Maybe if you asked them in person, they would give you a good reason why it was done that way. Or they even agree with and let you know that they could be changing in the next release. If you impress them enough, you might find a job offer in the future. It's also about networking with other Apple developers, too.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Have you ever seen a WWDC session? A two hour talk about how to use Grand Central Dispatch or the OpenCL framework could hardly be classified as non-technical.
They should have a small coding test you have to get through in order to get to the sign up page.
... a retraction to this posted any moment.
Waiting...
(Detailed take-apart here.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
then scalpers would stop doing this and ticket sales would go back to reflecting the actual demand for the event.
Ticket sales shouldn't reflect actual demand. Use an auction system so the price reflects real demand. Scalping is a sign your price is too low, cancelling due to lack of sales is a sign your price is too high. But using an auction system solves both problems, and ensures both that the price reflects the actual demand and that the house is always full.
That way, you don't have to introduce retarded and unnecessary restrictions on ticket buyers, such as preventing resale or creating laws against scalpers. It may mean that resellers will have to sell for less than they paid, which is perfectly reasonable for a genuine reseller (someone whose circumstances changed and can no longer attend, so wants to recover at least some of the cost.) That would be your test, if shows are sold out at auction-close, but resold tickets are selling for less than the auction price, the system works.
Won't happen. However much they whine about it, marketers like the artificial urgency, the hype of "sold out" shows and ten-times-over-cost scalping, it is what allows them to charge so much in the first place.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I agree completely. And Dutch auctions would be perfect for this. Keeps the price consistent across the board, so early purchases don't get cheap tickets while late comers (10 minutes later) pay through the nose.