Want to go to Apple’s WWDC? You’ll need to enter a lottery

Apple’s announced the dates for the 2014 edition of its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference and if you want tickets, chances are you’re going to have to enter a lottery.

The conference, set to take place between 2 and 6 June, is one of the most widely anticipated on the tech calendar, not least because Apple usually uses it to launch at least one headline device or piece of software.

Any developers wanting to attend though, have to apply for tickets and hope for the best. In its press release announcing the conference, Apply says that it’ll be tickets will be issued to attendees through random selection.

It does not however look like it’ll be keeping them in the dark for too long. Developers will apparently know whether or not they’ve been granted tickets by 7 April. In addition to the standard tickets, scholarships have been made available to ensure that free tickets are given to students as well as female engineers and developers.

“We have the most amazing developer community in the world and have a great week planned for them,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Every year the WWDC audience becomes more diverse, with developers from almost every discipline you can imagine and coming from every corner of the globe. We look forward to sharing with them our latest advances in iOS and OS X so they can create the next generation of great apps.”

The release gives little hint of what, if anything, Apple could launch at the conference. The paucity of leaks suggests that it won’t be any big name hardware. Despite the fact that OS X and iOS have both had major revamps in recent times, ReadWrite reckons that it’s likely we’ll see the reveal of iOS 8 as well as its Healthbook app and a few updates to OS X aimed specifically at developers.

Unless Apple’s therefore found a renewed ability to keep launches secret, we’d hold our breath on the much vaunted iWatch though.