71 Seconds

Sigh.

What I wrote about the Google i/o fail applies just fine here. http://www.michaelw.net/google-io-fail/

This is a classic case of optimizing the wrong problem.

The notion of first-come first-served makes almost no sense in an oversubscribed internet queue. It’s one thing to serve the first person standing in line outside a store, it’s another thing to pretend that this is meaningful when the queue is 100,000 people around the world all of whom were all in line at 10:00:00am.

It would have been more fair, less annoying and generally less embarrassing to formally recognize that this is effectively a random lottery. As such, have everyone pre-register over a period of days or weeks and then on the magic day, randomly select winners.

My rant appeared to help. I received an invite a month later.

If this is true, this lack of transparency with developers (note that is it not about an event for the public, it is about communication with developers), which hurts those who tried to get in fare and square and failed the most, is a start to another regression in Apple's history.