Developers took 8 days to buy up all the seating for WWDC last year. A lot has changed between then and now, most notably iPad, iPhone, and Lion bridging the huge gap between geek and technophobe. The result: WWDC 2011 has sold out in 10 hours.
The $1599.00 price tag didn’t act as a deterrent at all. The access given to developers during this conference is worth a hundred times that amount.
We knew passes were going to sell quickly, but we couldn’t have guessed it would have happened this quickly. So quickly in fact, Apple managed to sell passes at a rate of $800,000 per hour—5000 tickets, $1600, in ten hours.
It’s pretty impressive, no matter how you slice it.