This morning, tickets went on sale for Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference at $1,500 a piece. In a matter of two minutes the conference was sold out, and many developers were left staring at their computer screens with mouths agape.
But it looks like Apple didn’t sell all of the tickets just yet. Apple is reserving tickets and offering them to developers who were able to place their orders online.
Your heart races as you stare at your Mac’s screen, breathlessly anticipating the browser window loading another time. “If I just hit refresh again, maybe it will work,” you tell yourself. And it doesn’t. You check Twitter to see that your nerdy, developer friends can’t order tickets either.
Perhaps the above image is a more appropriate logo for this year’s WWDC, considering how many saddened devs won’t be able to attend. Apple gives third-party devs its full attention only one time of the year, and that has historically been WWDC. My colleague, John Brownlee, has already explained the reason tickets sold out so quickly. And Apple simply can’t open the conference up to more devs. Better luck next year.
Ever since 2008, WWDC tickets have sold out faster and faster. In 2009, tickets to WWDC tickets sold out in a month. In 2010, it took eight days. In 2011, tickets sold out in 12 hours. Last year, they sold out in 2 hours.
This year, though? You needed to record the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it melee of WWDC ticket buying with one of those super highspeed cameras they use to show bullets blasting through fruit. 5,000 tickets to WWDC sold out in under two minutes, and even if you were there from the very first second, the sheer crush of developers trying to login to Apple’s system crashed it.
In essence, unless you got lucky and Apple’s login system didn’t barf all over you, there was simply no way to get a ticket this year.
What can Apple do about WWDC in the future to allow more people to attend? Honestly, probably not much.
WWDC 2013 is already proving to be Apple’s most popular event ever. After opening ticket sales for the event a mere two minutes ago, Apple has already sold out.
Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee was trying to get a ticket. He says: “I started refreshing ten minutes before WWDC, and when the tickets went live, I was instantly hit with an error message when trying to login on multiple browsers. So many people were slamming the WWDC ticket page, Apple’s login system just keeled over. By 10:02AM PDT, all the tickets were totally gone. Unless you got lucky, you didn’t even have a chance.”
Apple announced the dates of WWDC 2013 yesterday, but tickets didn’t go on sale until 10AM PDT this morning. That’s a new one for Apple: usually, tickets for WWDC are available immediately upon the announcement of the dates for the conference. This system, however, has been criticized by many developers, especially those overseas, who never even had a chance to get a ticket.
It’s hard to imagine they liked this year’s free-for-all any better. Apple has got to come up with a better system for WWDC. May we suggest a lottery for 2014?
WWDC 2013 was just announced. Finally, Apple’s going to end this year’s drought, and show off some new stuff after going the entire first four months of the year without a single keynote or product announcement.
But now that WWDC is in our sights, what are people most excited about? There are tons of hardware rumors about the iPad, iPhone and even the iWatch but we doubt we’ll see either of those three. We’ve also heard that iOS 7 is going to have some huge changes, and we should see some of the next version of OS X. What are you guys most excited to see at WWDC 2013? Software or hardware?
WWDC is getting closer, which means we’re probably going to see Jony Ive’s vision for iOS 7 really soon. We know Jony’s not a big fan of skeuomorphism, so we expect to see a lot of flat UI design in iOS 7.
Rafael Justino just published his concept for what iOS 7 might look like, and while there’s still a great deal of skeuomorphism in Justino’s concept, his vision adds a lot more functionality to some of the basic apps of iOS.
The full video is ready for your examination below:
WWDC is the best place in the world to go and learn how to become a better iOS or OS X programmer. Only problem is it’s really freaking expensive, and it’s hard as hell to buy tickets before the thing sells out.
To help students out with the $1599 price tag for one ticket to WWDC, Apple announced that it will award 150 WWDC 2013 Student Scholarships. All you have to do to get the scholarship is be a full-time registered student, and make a killer iOS app.
Tickets to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference have sold out quickly in recent years — last year it took less than two hours — and this year is likely to be no different. With that being the case, a lot of developers are going to miss out. But they’ll still be able to catch up on WWDC sessions, but Apple is posting all of the videos online.
Apple has this morning announced that its 2013 Worldwide Developer Conference will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone West from Monday, June 10 through Friday, June 14. The five-day event will provide developers with a first look at the future of iOS and OS X.
Tickets will go on sale tomorrow, April 25, at 10 a.m. PDT.
A “confidential presentation” that outlines the upcoming product plans for a manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China, suggests the iPhone 5S could launch in June this year. Most rumors have suggested the device wouldn’t arrive until this fall, around 12 months after the iPhone 5, but an accessory manufacturer with direct links to Foxconn is confident it’ll be here much earlier.