- Google I/O is only two days long while WWDC is five days long, which makes the price a bit more comparable.
- Apple worked with Duarte and got all their speakers to rehearse in excess to get the presentations polished as much as possible before the event - what you saw on the public keynote with Zynga's CEO babbling about Farmville was amateur hour. All the speakers may have been nervous at some point or another about speaking to so many people, but they knew their stuff and pulled it off. While a lot of conferences do similar things, occasionally when it's a more laid-back or shorter event, they skimp so much here that it hurts. Nothing spoils a presentation more than an unprepared speaker with crazy slides to me. For one extreme example (to me), I went to an Amazon event local to me after WWDC last year, and saw this atrocious presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/aws-startup-even... (slide #4 is particularly bad). I'm sure it was pretty easy to guess how far my jaw fell going from a week long professional polished-to-an-extreme event where every single presentation used the same syntax highlighting, to that, where the person couldn't even get the bullet points to match in size or shape on a single slide.
- Partnerships? To do what? Any partner that would have participated in something like that at WWDC should it exist had employees there to go to the conference that could promote their products or whatever with people they meet over the course of a week.
- While WWDC this year had a noticeable lack of Mac-specific sessions, they had plenty foundational sessions for all platforms, and a LOT of talk about Safari and then the developer tools, which are clearly not only for iOS development, so there's no excuse for combining Xcode and iOS 4 together. Not to mention that 10.7 is probably not ready to even be previewed, so what else would Apple have presented there?
- The OP totally just doesn't even mention anything about the existence of Office Hours and Labs at I/O and WWDC respectively, which to many were the most valuable part of the conferences...I know people who didn't even bother to go to more than a couple sessions throughout the entire week at WWDC, they just permanently parked themselves in the labs on the first floor. (The labs/office hours being the places/times you could go and chat one-on-one with the people behind whatever you wanted help with or just wanted to talk about.)
Even when I get invited as press (I used to contribute to magazines more or less regularly) I am never stopped from watching the talks. The worst that happens is that the organization doesn't give me the same bag they give everyone else.
But I had lunch with James Gosling once.
Or, how a lot of these new developers were coming over from other platforms, and the value of networking with them is not as high as networking with veterans, many that didn't bother to show up this year because it was so iOS heavy. Assuming, of course, that a large part of "value" is the person's depth of knowledge, interests, and involvement in the community.
Android simply doesn't have that. The devices are released frequently and uneventfully.
Though note that Google I/O sold out very early (well in the early bird period). And here's the best part: No one who signed up knew they were getting ANY free phone, much less two.
So when someone says "See they had to bribe you to be here", it doesn't really wash given that the bribe wasn't known until you were already there.
Google wants developers developing and testing on the top devices, so they give them out.
What I'm trying to say is that WWDC has not been overrun by "non-developers." The keynote is the only part of the event open to the press, and they exploit it as much as they can, but the rest of the conference really is devoted to working with useful, relevant technology.
This is not to say that WWDC is better or worse than I/O, just that bloggers have not hijacked the event from real developers.
What's with the WWDC defensiveness? Seriously, relax.
They keynote sees a lot of press, many of whom got press passes. Yet it also sees a lot of less credible press (e.g. Gizmodo) who buy standard event tickets, clogging a spot, to be there. The same thing happened at I/O.
And I've met enough non-developers who were sent there for whatever reason to realize that it isn't the core of developers.
That said I did not buy my ticket to I/O this year under the assumption that I would get a phone, and I intend to go next year -- the value I got from the talks is still more than the price of admission and I couldn't care less if I got a phone out of it.
Google gave away phones at I/O last year as well as several other Android developer events, so it's not hard to predict that they'll keep doing it until they are satisfied with Android developer mindshare.
Knowing and hoping are different things. This year I/O sold out very quickly. I got around to signing up, during the early bird period, and my dreams and hopes were dashed by a registration full notice.