Edible Apple

Tickets to Apple’s WWDC 2011 event sold out in a whopping 12 hours since going on sale on Monday. By way of comparison, last year’s WWDC event sold out in 8 days. While last year’s event focused primarily with iOS, this year’s WWDC will have a dual focus on OS X and iOS.

Apple began taking WWDC registrations at 8:30 am Eastern Standard Time and they were completely sold out by 6:30. And at $1599 a pop, these tickets are not for the thrifty. As a result, a number of corporate developers were unable to secure tickets as a result of not receiving the corporate go-ahead fast enough to beat the rush.

Earlier on Monday we reported that Apple will most likely not use WWDC to unveil a new iPhone, as it has done consistently since unveiling the iPhone 3G in 2008. Instead, WWDC this year will be completely software-centric, focusing on the upcoming Summer release of OS X Lion and iOS 5, rumored to drop sometime this Fall.

In light of the uber-fast sellout, a number of people have argued that Apple needs to expand the conference in such a way to allow more people to attend. While Apple may or may not do that at WWDC conferences to come, one promising step it took last year was to post the session videos online only a week after the conference ended without any additional fees aside from the requirement that users be registered Apple developers. In 2009, in contrast, Apple made its iPhone and Mac session videos available for $299 each or $499 for the bundle.

Baby steps.