The Apple WWDC 2-Minute Sell-Out Cover-Up

Tickets for WWDC sold out in 2 minutes!! I can’t believe it — and they didn’t even save me one? I am not a happy camper!

All jokes aside — did Apple really sell out of tickets for this year’s WWDC in two minutes compared to the two hours of last year? As you’re about to read, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there appeared to be a plentiful stash of WWDC tickets well after Cupertino bragged of selling the event out in two minutes.

The big question is this: is Apple actually having trouble selling the WWDC this year, since everyone and their grandmother knows that the only new hardware we’re going to see are some refreshed MacBooks?

Bor-ing.

Don’t fret if you are a developer who didn’t have your credit card handy in the supposed two-minute window for buying WWDC 2013 tickets — you might get a phone call to have a seat at the event, after all.

4,500 tickets were made available for paying developers since April 25th, but it seems not all have been sold out. Apple has personally invited around 500 developers, and I know they felt like they were apart of a modern day Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory minus the tasty chocolate. The interesting thing is that many of these developers who Apple reached out to were told that tickets were sold out when they tried to purchase them. It appears that Apple either managed to make a whole heck of a lot more room in the Moscone Center — or, they never really sold out the tickets in two minutes.

So, are they really sold out, or could Apple not keep up with the demand? It is a possibility that Apple just went ahead and shut the site down, claiming they were sold out so they could give more tickets to the press, VIP guests, partner companies, and student scholarships. Of course we want the press there, right?

Another possibility is that, because iPhone 5S anticipation is so low for this year’s WWDC (in spite of what some in the tech media would have you believe), even the developers aren’t that jazzed about attending. With no new iPhone, no new iPad, no Steve Jobs, and an iOS 7 beta that developers are going to have easy access to whether they attend the WWDC or not, what is the real draw of the WWDC this year, anyway? Tim Cook? Jony Ive?

Personally, I think I see what Apple is doing: they want to build much more buzz for this year’s WWDC (maybe precisely because there is a noticeable drop in demand). Whether that means that the WWDC actually sold out in minutes and they somehow managed to add more seats to the event, or that saying they sold out was part of raising the buzz for the event, or that Apple’s servers crashed, and Cupertino went into “crazy we are sold out” mode instead of “come back later we are having some issues mode,” it’s hard to imagine that hyping the event is not behind this story, one way or another.