WWDC sells out despite iPhone emphasis
The Apple World Wide Developer Conference, despite having received a great deal of criticism for being all about the iPhone and iPad at the expense of OS X and for having a higher price, has sold out in just a few short days.
The conference is always popular, but there has been a lot of grumbling this year because so much of the content is planned around Apple’s new iPad and the iPhone. Given that every conference space was sold within 8 days of the announcement, it seems like even the grumblers wanted to go. In addition, the quick sell-out came despite a conference price of $1,595, $300 higher than those for the event last year. The 2008 WWDC, the first in which there were sessions on the iPhone, was the first event to sell out. The WWDC also sold out last year, but took an entire month to do so, according to a PCWorld article.
One has to wonder, given the apparent popularity of the conference, whether or not the significant inclusion of iPad and iPhone sessions is a bad thing. These are not cheap seats, and they seem to be going like the proverbial hotcakes, despite the complaints about the relative paucity of OS X topics. It is possible that the problem is that the iPhone and iPad have brought a large number of new developers into the fold, and that the older, OS X-related developers are feeling neglected because they are beginning to feel like a minority. Certainly, someone is buying all of those high-priced tickets in a hurry.
This could be borne out by the state of this year’s Apple Design Awards, which are to be given for iPhone apps only this year, the first time that has ever happened. It is quite possible that the overall number of developers, between OS X and iPad/iPhone, have grown so fast due to the popularity of the iPhone and iPad that they are now in the majority, and that OS X-only developers are falling to the rear in order of numbers. The Mac OS X platforms are not going away. Perhaps it is time to either split off one of the two groups, or to expand the offerings at WWDC to include a more even sampling of both.
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