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Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
Sorry, tickets are sold out.
However, you will still be able to take advantage of great WWDC content.
Stay tuned for exciting announcements on videos and more.
- olgagalchenko 14y agoDid anyone get in? I got the error page that said to restart my browser at 10:00 am. Then the maintenance page at 10:01. At 10:02, it was sold out. Should they go to a lottery system? It seems like who gets in is pretty arbitrary already, at least it would take the stress out of it. I was nervous about it all morning, and my heart was racing just before 10. Such craziness.
- melling 14y agoThe tickets were in my cart. So close. The videos are going to be released during the show. Anyone in NYC going to set up a WWDC East event?
- nglevin 14y agoBack in 2011, there was one guy who waited a few minutes before deciding to purchase, checked the site again minutes later. Then Apple gave the "we're all sold out" message. He goes to check the Apple Store. It still says that there's something in his shopping cart. So, on a whim, he decides to complete the checkout process. Put in his address, name, info, credit card, clicked through a few screens. And he got in. All thanks to a cookie. Alas, it doesn't seem like 2013 will have any "saved by a cookie" moments.
- melling 14y agoMaybe I shouldn't have taken the time to type in my email address and phone # right before I clicked my final submit? :-(
- collias 14y agoI had a ticket in my cart, billing/shipping info filled out and everything. I hit the "Purchase" button, and the ticket was gone. It kicked me back out to the store page.
- Kaedon 14y agoFeels ridiculous that this sold out so quickly. It's a shame.
- blueprint 14y ago2 minutes after they went on sale…
- dzlobin 14y agoOne minute. I was on the checkout screen at 1:01 and it was sold out.
- blueprint 14y agoSame as us here. Just entered our info and bam, request failed.
- ryanlbrown 14y agoSame here.
- mikebonnell 14y agoAt 1:01, had ticket, purchase being confirmed and then errored out. Damn.
- ggualberto 14y agoMe too.
- gluemonkey 14y agoSame thing happened to me and I just got off the phone with Apple support - they are saying that this has happened to a lot of customers and since it is a "developing story" they can not provide a lot of details. They did say however that if you made it to the checkout process your ticket was in fact reserved and once they get things sorted out they will e-mail you at your Apple ID to allow you to actually purchase your ticket.
- collias 14y ago
- chrisdinn 14y agoI was refreshing constantly after 1pm. I saw the sign-in button but got an error trying to access the store. Looks like it sold out in the exact amount of time it took to process a transaction.
- dzlobin 14y agoAnyone else get this screen in Chrome? http://cl.ly/image/2E2a1y0u1g0N http://cl.ly/image/2E2a1y0u1g0N By the time I pivoted to Safari one minute later it was sold out.
- harshaw 14y agoI got that screen as well - I went over to safari and game over
- scoopr 14y agoI got this screen in Safari as well. Went to web inspector to clear cookies, but I was too slow :/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deminature 14y agoI got that at first, opened an incognito window and re-logged in and that appeared to have fixed it, perhaps sessions created from before the maintenance were broken?
- MaxGabriel 14y agoI got it in Chrome as well, though a sister comment got it in safari. Any ideas on the cause? Would want to avoid this in the future. The only exceptional thing about my account was that I'm a member of two dev programs, a business and an enterprise, on the same account.
- pat2man 14y agoHad two browsers open, got that error in both.
- kurry 14y agohttp://i36.tinypic.com/2555m6a.png http://i36.tinypic.com/2555m6a.png yeah me too!
- twistedpair 14y agoWho designed that screen? Where's the fail whale?
- danpalmer 14y ago1 minute 8 seconds.
- maqr 14y agoI tried to log in as soon as the site came back up, it offered me team selection for another company, and even then wouldn't let me continue. I switched browsers to try again and they were already sold out. Very frustrating.
- jfb 14y agoUnder two minutes. Bonkers.
- n9com 14y agoThis is pretty unbelievable. Refreshed at 10:00 and the site was already down with a "we'll be back soon" message. Obviously, the bigger devs would have got their tickets days (weeks?) ago.
- danpalmer 14y agoI'm not sure they will have. Perhaps a few of the really major companies like EA, but I know some pretty prominent developers for the platform and none of them have ever mentioned anything about getting priority tickets.
- bri3d 14y agoIf you have contacts you definitely get tickets, but they don't always come early. I think there's some subset reserved for Developer Relations and they give them out at will - I've never noticed a particular strategy with respect to app store placement.
- nglevin 14y agoI believe that's true, regarding Developer Relations. I did get into a Tech Talk one year that was sold out through a large media company, thanks to that. However, that's a tricky road to go down. I have no idea what Apple's criteria is for that, and I know some teams that have worked closely with Apple in the past that never got that treatment.
- collias 14y agoMeh. I'm a developer of one of the top 3 grossing music apps in the iOS App Store, and Apple doesn't give us anything.
- kemiller 14y agoWhen are they going to move to a bigger venue? This is crazy.
- kerbs 14y agoBigger than Moscone? Cowboys Stadium for the keynote?
- nglevin 14y agoMoscone North alone would be an improvement from Moscone West. Heck, just take over all of Moscone for the week! I've been told the reason the event has been kept small is to maintain the same ratio of Apple developers to attendees. But I think that overstates the value of the Apple devs a bit. The attendees at this event really are one of a kind.
- grbalaffa 14y agoThey haven't done the traditional post-session question & answer time in years, so other than the "labs", there is no interaction with the Apple engineers. They could set up a more stringent reservation system for the labs and sell more conference tickets if they wanted. But, like another poster said, selling out in under 2 minutes makes them look good.
- jcdavis 14y agoApple still only uses Moscone West (at least as of last year). They could also use Moscone North & South as the big conferences do (Oracle OpenWorld/Dreamforce/etc)
- kerbs 14y agoThe problem is still room sizes. You would almost need to mirror the conference in each venue. The Apple engineer area/cafeteria etc. couldn't really hold any more.
- arn 14y ago
- yardie 14y agoLogged in at 10:04. Fuck me. I thought I barely missed the cut, now I see that I wasn't even close.
- dionidium 14y agoEverybody's reporting this "sold out in 2 minutes" number, but I got nothing but errors the instant they went on sale. I think they actually sold out immediately (where "immediately" means "as long as it took for the transactions to process).
- pkamb 14y agoI got an error in Chrome, then immediately switched to Safari which worked. They were all sold out by the middle of my buying process though... tickets definitely weren't saved in your cart until you buy.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- harshaw 14y agoOur guess in how this went down: first 5000 connections with using account/session where the credit card was already on file. This didn't work for us since we were attempting to pay with the corporate credit card.
- smackfu 14y agoThe way competent ticket sellers work is that they give out tokens to people as they start the process. Once all the tokens are given out, new people get denied. The token has to be refreshed as they go through the purchase steps, otherwise it gets put back in the pool.
- neop 14y agoThis was certainly not the case here. Many people (including me) were able to add the tickets to their shopping cart and start the checkout process, only to be received by an error after entering shipping and billing information.
- neop 14y agoDisregard that, I contacted Developer relations and apparently they may be holding tickets for all those in my situation.
- smackfu 14y agoWell, seems like quite a few of the iOS developers I follow on Twitter with thousands of follower seem to have missed out.
- MaxGabriel 14y agoFor future reference, is it possible to login to the developer center before the tickets go on sale, so you don't have to login? I didn't think to do that until 9:45 pacific, and by then logging in got a 'we'll be back soon' message.
- cleverjake 14y agoA guy in my office was logged in before it went live, but when it came back up the session had been cleared. So my guess would be no.
- ikt 14y agoBlizzcon also sold out pretty fast. What's the point of this again?
- umsm 14y agoThe point is to take your money to be "the first"... akin to camping outside the apple store?
- simonsarris 14y agoWhy can't we stop this madness? I don't see how first-come-first-serve here serves developers well at all. Why don't they let anyone with a credit card join a ticket lottery? Just trying for a ticket could cost say, $10 to discourage people from trying every one of their credit cards. Perhaps to make it more fair, a winner must take their tickets, to discourage gaming. This goes on for two days. Then the "real" tickets go on sale, the lotto winners get their tickets. This way if you run to the computer at 10:03 or get out the hospital the next day or just simply forget until dinnertime, you still get a chance.
- tolmasky 14y agoI honestly don't think the problem is how you portion out the tickets. The system you describe does not seem to be any better at getting the tickets in the right hands. I'm not so concerned with the unfairness of the current system, but with the fact that many of these tickets will be completely wasted. The real problem is that they've combined a 1 hour media event with a developer conference. So many people every year use their ticket JUST for the keynote. It's like combining the Super Bowl and JSConf, then reaching the conclusion that obviously JSConf needs a bigger venue because millions of people tried to get a ticket. I'd be really curious to see how many developers would seriously be willing to throw down $1600 for a keynote-less conference that notoriously offers no free stuff (ala Google IO) and has many of the materials available afterward. Then instead of trying to solve the intractable problem of a lottery that leaves more people satisfied, you'd actually see who really cares about the content.
- magicalist 14y ago> It's like combining the Super Bowl and JSConf, then reaching the conclusion that obviously JSConf needs a bigger venue because millions of people tried to get a ticket JSConf also sells out in like 10 minutes, which is why they moved to a lottery system. There are no media events or giveaways there (mostly), just a really really good event that refuses to get larger because getting larger may (probably will) spoil some aspects of the event that make it really good. Think about the lottery this way: if WWDC sold out in two minutes, it's likely that more than the number of people that can attend were on there trying to buy tickets at the same time, so it was really down to a lottery of timeouts, latencies, and overwhelmed systems. A real lottery at least makes it slightly more civilized, doesn't give geographic or equipment-based advantages, and spreads out the entry times over a day or two to let all timezones take equal advantage. So, there's not really a gain in the quality of the person who gets to go, but it does call a spade a spade and takes some of the frustration out of the physical process of getting a ticket (if not with the result of the attempt). edit: I do like non-transferable tickets, however (with some negotiated process of refundable tickets). This can be mostly enforced by essentially requiring will-call for all ticket purchases. While some people might be willing to let you borrow their credit card/id, not that many strangers will. You will have to be prepared to be a jerk and turn people down, though.
- SeoxyS 14y agoPut bluntly: this is bullshit. The advance notice was slightly better than last year, but the website was intermittently down for the entire two minutes tickets were on sale. I was there, trying to buy them at 9:59am, at 10:00:20am the website finally went live, pressed the buy button and was greeted by "unable to process your request." Seriously, Apple needs to figure this shit out. Whether that means opening up more seats, making tickets more expensive, or even just having a website that doesn't go down on you… something.
- schwa 14y agoWorked perfectly for me. Sucks for you.
- SeoxyS 14y agoLucky :). But that's my point: It's not even first-come first-serve anymore, it's a server-load-powered lottery.
- smackfu 14y agoWas the advance notice any better than last year? Last year, you either knew about the sale in the window or you didn't. This year, even if you knew about it, people missed out.
- xenophanes 14y agoThey should raise their prices. A lot. So the people who value it the most get tickets. This is not an ideal solution but it's much better than the current one.
- lutusp 14y ago> They should raise their prices. A lot. So the people who value it the most get tickets. The problem with raising prices should be obvious -- it preferentially selects wealthier attendees, not necessarily those who "value it the most". > This is not an ideal solution but it's much better than the current one. I don't think you've thought your position through. All raising prices achieves is to limit attendance to those who didn't care about the high price.
- derefr 14y agoHow about pricing it at "two months' salary", like the diamond industry? ;)
- xenophanes 14y agoYou "don't think you've thought your position through" despite me predicting the complaint you made and pre-including an acknowledgement of the problem? The fact is -- contrary to your claims, compatible with mine -- raising prices does both. It slants things towards people who value it more in dollars. People get a higher score for this both by valuing WWDC more and by valuing dollars less. That is better than random. Next time leave out the meta discussion insults. Note also that, "if demand exceeds supply, raise prices" is basic economics and standard advice on HN for many other things. e.g. if you're a freelancer with too many people trying to hire you, patio11 would say to raise prices. you would not then reply saying he didn't think things through because all that is going to accomplish is having price-insensitive clients rather than good clients. EDIT and how many people go to WWDC as a hobby? how many are really price insensitive? a lot of them, even if they have money, want to get business value exceeding the ticket price, or they will not go. filtering by who can get the most business value by attending would not please certain people with certain egalitarian mindsets, but would still actually be way better than random. lots of people look price insensitive because the business value for them attending is $25,000 or whatever -- far more than the ticket price. but that isn't actually price insensitivity and it's a good thing to use a system that makes sure those people get to attend.
- gesman 14y agoTickets were sold out way before the actual formality (such as opening website for crowd that is thinking that they can buy the tickets too).
- pandaexpress 14y agoI was sitting at my Mac Book refreshing like crazy. I got a ticket.
- xoail 14y agoIn reality they were sold out in 2 seconds. There needs be a better way to handle this.
- jordanthoms 14y agoI don't believe that it actually took 49 minutes for Google I/O to sell out - that's just when they put the notice up. I started trying to buy a ticket the second orders opened and still didn't get one.
- wesnerm2 14y agoI personally think that this is all a charade. Apple most likely preselected top developers for this conference. This is a conference with a non-disclosure agreement. Given how secretive Apple is, they probably wouldn't want to tip off competition.
- radley 14y agoRespectfully: this demonstrates that Google IO isn't selling out quickly just because of the toys...
- CoffeeDregs 14y agoApple’s tickets sold out 95 percent faster than Google’s tickets Wow! Apple is totally kicking Google's ASS! WTF kind of statistic is this? The measure of two tech giants is how ludicrously quickly they sell out tickets to their conferences?
- mistircek 14y agoI believe they were just being funny, reporting how ridiculous these event ticket buying process became, instead of reporting this as a comparison between two companies.
- twistedpair 14y agoIs the world becoming a smaller place? Google I/O has been impossible to get into the last couple years selling out in minutes, now WWDC too. But it is not just dev conferences. As an avid runner I've run a number of races every year. Recently a number of them have gone from selling out 12K slots in months to hours. In grad school classes filled up in seconds as well when registration opened. This is a manifestation of our JIT culture. No longer do you mark the registration date in your calendar. No, now your call family and friends and have everyone raring to go at 11:59 PM before registration opens. If you're keen, you might probe their API and reverse engineer the site to get a jump on others. Now that everything is in the ether, there is no concrete queue. You can't get there early if you're diehard. It is simply the roulette wheel of HTTP errors that determines who gets what today.
- lsllc 14y agoI heard there was a pre-sale yesterday for the "blessed" companies (you may have noticed that the developer centers were down for a bit yesterday as they were again today). So there were probably not that many tickets actually available today.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dannowatts 14y agoi felt that i had good timing for getting wwdc ticket last year. after seeing how quickly they sold out this morning, i know i was very lucky to get a ticket this year! like last year, i'll make a stop at the alternative wwdc (http://altwwdc.com http://altwwdc.com) conference that has some good people from appsterdam spitting out the truth. for me, wwdc is a great time to meet some cool people in town for the conference, but it's easier to meet people (and have a conversation) at the get togethers/parties/bars over a beer versus during the conference itself.