Apple This

So Apple’s annual developers conference is coming up, but don’t bother looking up tickets because Apple sold out of them on Monday. Yeah, they sold out already, and in record time nonetheless. With fast ticket sellouts come quick scalpers and that is definitely the story here. Many people are scalping tickets to the event on sites such as eBay and Craigslist with prices reaching as high as $4,599, which is nearly triple the sticker price of $1,599.

The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) runs from June 6th to June 10th, 2011  and was sold out as of Monday, March 28th, 2011 in less than 12 hours which was dramatically faster than last year when it took a lousy eight days to sell out. 2009 wasn’t even close when it took almost a month to sell out. Tickets for this year’s WWDC were priced at $1,599, the same as they were for the 2010 edition.

Apple allows developers to buy multiple tickets with extra activation codes in order to hand them out to colleagues. However, some of these developers are taking advantage of the sellout and are selling their extra tickets at extremely high prices. The ticket with the highest bid that I have seen so far stood at $3,000.

A pair of tickets seen on the New York and San Francisco editions of Craigslist have been priced at $2,400 and $2,500. A seller in California had priced his extra ticket at $2,000 and increased the price by $500 a few hours later.

According to Rohit Sethi, the man in California selling the ticket, “I can deal for $2,500 only and by bank transfer. If you have any friends in the bay area, I can give them the code in person and they can activate on the spot too for authenticity by giving money in person.”

The only people allowed to attend the event are Apple-registered developers but the entry bar is low. Programmers only have to pay $99 for a one-year membership to Apple’s developer program and that’s it, there are no other eligibility requirements.

One good thing, for developers that is, is that Apple does not explicitly restrict the resale of WWDC tickets. Apple has not immediately replied to questions about their resale policy or whether or not they will take any action against people who resell WWDC tickets.

Scott Schwarzhoff, Vice President of Marketing for Appcelerator, the company known best for their multi-platform Titanium development tool, was not surprised about how fast the tickets for the event sold out. According to him, “The message from Jobs at the launch of the iPad 2, that this is the ‘post-PC world’ is hitting home. If you want to be part of that post-PC world, as a developer you need a ticket, and that ticket is WWDC.”

Schwarzhoff also argued that even though the iPod and iPhone have been successes for Apple, the iPad is the first device that has really grabbed the attention of business software developers. “You’re seeing demand from the more traditional IT and computing industry because of the iPad,” said Schwarzhoff. “The iPad is affecting areas that previously weren’t affected by a pure consumer device.”

It has already been noted that this year’s conference is expected to focus primarily on software as opposed to hardware and that the iPhone 5 will most likely not be in attendance. This intrigues me. With one of the most anticipated devices since the iPad 2 not coming out at the conference it surprises me that the conference sold out so fast.

But if you want a ticket to the show, you had better hit up eBay or Craigslist, and you must also be ready to part with about $2,000 to $3,000 at least.

Source: ComputerWorld – Apple’s WWDC sells out; scalpers price tickets up to $4,600

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