Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s annual worldwide developer conferences cost the company about $50 million a year to put on and the company is building a new center at its Silicon Valley headquarters to assist developers, according to its top App Store executive.

This is from Phil Schiller’s testimony yesterday at the ongoing Epic v Apple court proceedings.

$50 million. That’s a lot. Going to assume (speculation on my part) that that number includes the costs of paying all the engineers for time they contribute to prepping their sessions, as well as for time they spend at WWDC itself. And then, at least in the olden days, there’s the cost of renting the venue, prepping the venue, and staffing the venue.

Those costs surely have come down significantly, now that everything is virtual and held in house.

Another piece of the accounting puzzle that’s changed is the income from the hefty $1,599 ticket price. Multiply that by 5,000 attendees (pre-pandemic) and that’s about $8 million back to Apple.

The second bit of that quote is “the company is building a new center at its Silicon Valley headquarters to assist developers”. Can’t wait to learn about this.

Will WWDC ever return to an in-person event? If so, will it be downsized (like sporting events, with their 25% crowd limits, at least in the short term)? Will this center be designed to replace the in-person labs that are such a critical part of pre-COVID WWDC?