So last Thursday, the 25th, WWDC tickets went up for sale and were gone in something like two minutes. Two minutes. Fifteen hundred and ninety nine dollars a pop, and the whole allotment vanished before most people even finished loading the page.
I wasn't trying to buy one myself, I'm not an iOS developer and Moscone Center is a long way from where I'm sitting typing this, but I had a browser tab open anyway because a buddy of mine, an actual working iOS dev up in Seattle, had been talking about it all week like it was the Super Bowl. He had his laptop out, his phone out as a backup, and I think at one point he had his work desktop pulled up too just in case. He still didn't get one. He refreshed, the page said tickets were available, he clicked buy, and by the time the confirmation loaded it just told him they were gone. That's the whole story from his end. Three screens and still nothing.
Here's the thing that bugs me about it. This isn't a lottery system, it's straight first come first served, which means the people with the fastest connections, the least laggy browsers, and honestly the least amount of respect for their day job (refreshing a checkout page at 10am on a Thursday) are the ones who get in. It has nothing to do with who's actually shipping good apps or who'd get the most out of being there. It's basically a reflex test. I get why Apple doesn't want to deal with a bidding war or a full-on lottery with all the fairness complaints that would bring, but the current setup just rewards whoever's fastest on the trigger, and that's its own kind of unfair, it's just a different group of people winning.
And it's not like this is a small event anymore. WWDC used to be, from what I remember reading about the early 2000s versions, a smaller thing where you could basically walk up. Now it's thousands of developers fighting over five thousand ish seats, for a conference that's what, five days long, in June. The keynote alone will probably get more advance speculation written about it between now and June than most product launches get in their entire lifecycle. People will be parsing invite fonts and background colors for hints at what's coming. I do not have the patience for that particular hobby but plenty of people clearly do.
Small tangent, but it drives me a little nuts that "sold out instantly" gets treated as a marketing win. Like, congratulations, your event is popular enough that normal people can't get in through normal means. That's not really a compliment to the format, it's a supply problem dressed up as hype. I felt the same way about concert tickets for years before I mostly gave up going to concerts.
Anyway. What actually happens at WWDC this year is still a couple months off, so there's not much to say yet beyond the obvious guessing games, next version of iOS, next version of OS X, maybe some hardware if we're lucky though Apple's software events rarely have hardware surprises baked in. I'll probably end up reading the keynote liveblogs like everyone else who didn't get a ticket, coffee in hand, refreshing a different kind of page than my friend was refreshing last Thursday.
One last thing worth mentioning while it's fresh: some of the Google Glass Explorer units have started actually showing up on people now, not just being unboxed for blog photos. Someone at the coffee shop near my apartment had a pair on last weekend and I did the thing where you try not to stare and fail completely. Different company, different kind of exclusivity problem, still that same feeling of a small group getting early access to something the rest of us are just reading about. Might write more on that once I've actually seen one up close instead of across a room over an oat milk latte.
For now I'm just glad I wasn't the one with three screens open on a Thursday morning. My blood pressure thanks me.