So WWDC tickets went on sale Monday morning and I completely blew it, which is a very on-brand way for me to start this week.
For anyone who doesn't follow this stuff (hi, hello, why are you on a tech blog): Apple opened registration for its Worldwide Developers Conference at 10am Pacific on May 7th. The show runs June 11-15 in San Francisco, same Moscone West setup as always, $1,599 a ticket. And it sold out in something like an hour and a half. Maybe less. I've seen people claiming under an hour but I wasn't exactly standing there with a stopwatch, I was standing there hitting refresh on a page that said "Please check back soon" while my coffee went cold.
I had my alarm set. I had the tab open the night before. I even quit out of Tweetdeck because I convinced myself it was eating bandwidth, which, no, that's not how any of this works, but panic makes you do dumb things at 9:58am. By the time the page actually let me add a ticket to a cart it was already telling me registration was closed. The whole window was smaller than it takes me to make breakfast.
This is the third year running I've heard about this exact scenario from at least four different people I follow, and every year it gets a little more absurd. There were already tickets showing up on eBay by Monday afternoon, going for multiples of face value, which is its own gross little ecosystem that Apple pretends not to notice. I get that demand outstrips supply and there's only so much room in Moscone West, but at some point "first come first served over a 90 minute window" stops being a fair system and starts being a lottery that rewards people who don't have day jobs with meetings at 10am.
Anyway. What actually matters here isn't my bruised ego, it's what's presumably going to get announced. The rumor mill has been extremely loud about a MacBook Pro refresh, possibly with a much higher resolution screen than anything Apple's shipped on a laptop before. I'll believe it when I see it, Apple rumors are wrong more often than tech blogs like to admit, but the timing lines up. Mountain Lion is also still sitting there waiting for a real release date, since it's been in developer preview since February and WWDC is the obvious place to nail that down.
Honestly the software side interests me more than any hardware refresh would. iOS has felt a little stale to me the last couple point releases, and I say that as someone who's been carrying an iPhone since the 3G. Notification Center was the last thing that felt like a real leap forward and that shipped back in iOS 5. I want to see something that actually changes how I use the phone day to day, not just a new icon for the same six apps.
I did manage to snag a spot on the standby list, for whatever that's worth historically, which is not much. A friend of mine got in off the waitlist two years ago and still talks about it like he won the lottery. I'm not holding my breath. Worst case I do what I did last year, which is sit in my kitchen refreshing three different liveblogs at once and yelling at my roommate about screen resolutions he has zero interest in.
One small thing I'll say in defense of the whole circus: for a conference that's ostensibly for developers, there's something kind of nice about a room full of actual engineers getting the news at the same time as the public instead of six weeks of embargoed briefings first. Doesn't make the ticket rush any less brutal, but it's part of why the keynote still feels like an event instead of a press release with slides.
If you got a ticket, tell me what you're most hoping gets announced. If you also didn't get a ticket, we can be sad together in the comments.