WWDC Sells Out In 2 Minutes; Ticket On eBay 45 Minutes Later 162
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."
Re:Is there a real reason to go? (Score:1, Insightful)
Just curious, as an iOS and an OS X dev before that, I've never really seen any reason to go to this -- even when I lived close enough I happened to walk by it on my way to the Whole Foods one year. Is there a lot of opportunity to make sales or schmooze your way into Apple employees' good graces? 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. I do remember them having some freebies and stuff at previous ones, but nothing worth the ticket price.
Shhhh! You're not supposed to question the merits of anything with even half this much hype. It crushes the souls of the sheople who paid exhorbitant ticket prices and made travel arrangements and bragged to their buddies that they will be attending.
There they are now, staring saucer-eyed at the Marketing Dept. waiting for the meaning of their lives to be validated. Don't ruin it for them.
Re:No proof. (Score:1, Insightful)
While transferring tickets for WWDC is generally not allowed, an ambitious eBay seller is attempting to get $10K for the $1,600 ticket.
And if the result was that he lost his $1600 then scalpers would stop doing this and ticket sales would go back to reflecting the actual demand for the event.
It's just like spam. Stop rewarding them and they go away. This is even easier than spam because there is a real cost of doing business, not nearly free e-mails.
Course that would require something rather unAmerican like acting on principle. Well maybe I shouldn't pick on America. Just about all of Western civilization has forgotten what this means. I guess they're too busy being offended by something or the other.
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Even a small one. $1600 is pretty standard for a conference or even a basic class about database structure or project management. It all depends on what's there. If it's a yearly sales pitch, then yea, that's expensive. But if there's a bunch of people there that are doing crazy new stuff it's worth it just to mingle. Some of the stuff I work on is so proprietary to our industry there's just no info on the net about it, so these conferences can be a goldmine.
Re:remember when this was for developers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. It's all the fanboys. [pixelcity.com]
Fans of making money, that is.