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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

If they're doing random selection maybe they could lower the price of the ticket a bit. Hard sell for an indie dev especially when flights are accommodation are factored in. Around £3000 total not including daily expenses (transport, food etc).

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The upside is that you see far fewer people attending who aren't developers or aren't serious about Apple's platforms. Google I/O, for example, has had quality issues (with both the sessions and attendees) due to how inexpensive it was and the expectation of a giveaway to offset the price of admission.

That said, Apple's "return" compensation in terms of giveaway gifts and the like is a bit... stingy. Especially given how unbelievable Apple's profits have been of late.

WWDC giveaway: A $40 jacket that says "14" on it. Google I/O giveaway: $1449 Chromebook pixel.

So much for loyalty.

Your 'return' is hands on time with engineers and access to developer sessions. It's a developer conference, not a giveaway.

The entire idea is to not provide any "gifts" and "devices" to people attending, so the only reason they are attending is for quality 1:1 time with the Apple engineers plus the opportunity to socialize with your fellow Apple developers. The actual sessions are available on video, so you don't need to attend for those. Viewed from this perspective, lack of giveaways is a very deliberate and desirable feature of the WWDC.

That makes sense. I can certainly see how giving away freebies is not the way to attract serious developers, and can be distracting.

When you have to give your product away in order to help generate output from your developer community, that is an issue.

The lack of hardware freebies at Apple = developer opportunity essentially. Your "gift" is a healthy vibrant ecosystem, should you choose to accept it.

Why should they have to give anything special out? A bit of swag, sure, but pricey items? By your measure, they should be costing themselves at least $549/attendee (the difference between the Chromebook price and Google I/O admission cost). That's not including all the other costs that the admissions likely doesn't cover completely. Even for a profitable company that can afford it, other than the continued effort to drive everything to zero value, what's the point?

You make a developer event essentially free, and actually a net positive in material value, you end up with no developers attending. It's Comic Con for tech nerds. For a developer conference to have more value for the developers than the non-developers or they'll get pushed out because they're in the minority of interested parties.

> So much for loyalty.

Loyalty? Is buying attendance by giving away free stuff a way to show loyalty? Is buying users of software and players of games by giving it a way showing loyalty? It's a fucking PR stunt.

Honestly, a week in San Francisco with an expensive flight is going to be pricey and a hard sell even if the WWDC tickets are free.

Apple has done a pretty good job keeping the price constant since 2010 (and before that there was just an early bird discount, which they got rid of once it started selling out early.)

Yeah, it's a hard justification for us aussies these days. Minimum spend ends up being about 4,000

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