So that happened again. Apple opened up WWDC ticket sales this morning and by the time I'd actually gotten my coffee and sat down at my desk, they were gone. Not "selling fast." Gone. Multiple people online are saying it took under two minutes, some people are saying closer to one, and I believe them because I had the page open and hit refresh at 10:01am my time (I'm three hours behind Cupertino, so this was 7:01 Pacific, a full minute after doors opened) and the "Sold Out" banner was already sitting there mocking me.
$1,599 a ticket, by the way, in case anyone was wondering what a shot at seeing this years iOS reveal in person costs. I wasn't going to buy one anyway, if I'm honest, because getting from here to San Francisco in June on short notice is its own kind of expensive, but I like the idea of having the option. That's gone now for another year.
What gets me is the whole ritual of it. Every year it's the same thing: Apple announces a date (June 10th through 14th this time, at Moscone West like always), a horde of developers and bloggers and people who just really want the swag bag clear their calendars and set alarms, and then it's over before most of us finish loading the page. I've seen a few tweets already about tickets popping up on resale sites for two, three times face value within the hour. That always feels a little gross to me, scalping a developer conference like it's a Radiohead show, but I guess if you're a company with money to burn and no ticket, what else are you going to do.
The actual interesting part isn't the ticket scramble, it's what everyone thinks is going to be shown once the keynote happens. The rumor mill has been going for months now about a bigger visual overhaul to iOS than we've seen since the original iPhone, and with Jony Ive running software design since last fall's shakeup, that tracks. Whether "flatter" ends up meaning "better" is a separate question I don't think anyone can answer yet, including probably the people building it. I'll say this much: I've been on iOS since the 3GS and the visual language hasn't really moved in any meaningful way in years. A shakeup is overdue even if I end up hating the specific execution.
Meanwhile, on the complete other side of the industry this week, Google's been doing the opposite of scarcity marketing. I/O is going on right now up in San Francisco too (funny how these things cluster into the same few weeks every spring) and they went and launched a whole streaming music service, Play Music All Access, right there during the keynote, no waitlist, no invite code, just sign up and pay. Nine ninety-nine a month, or seven ninety-nine if you get in before the end of June, which is a genuinely good deal compared to what I'm paying for Rdio right now. I might actually switch once the trial's up, mostly because I already dump a bunch of MP3s into Google Play Music anyway and having them live next to a real catalog instead of some weird hybrid library sounds nice. Spotify's still the default answer everyone gives when you ask what streaming service to use, but I don't think that's permanent.
It's a strange contrast, these two approaches happening in the same calendar week from the two biggest players in the room. One company makes you fight over 5,000 tickets like it's a lottery, the other one just flips a switch and lets a few hundred million Android and Chrome users sign up from their couch. I don't think either approach is wrong exactly, they're just optimizing for completely different things — Apple wants the room to feel like an event, Google wants the product in as many hands as possible by dinner.
Anyway. No WWDC for me this year, same as basically every year. I'll be reading the liveblogs in June like the rest of us who didn't have a credit card ready at 7am Pacific.