With so many people questioning what I meant around near final at Gamescom, I want to clarify my own comments (typically I wouldnt chime in on a Sony thread, since I cant speak to what Sony is doing), but since I cant start a new thread, Im adding my comments here. So before this starts Im not here to bash Sony.
At E3, you saw Xbox One games running in a couple of environments:
Development PCs (these were our early Alpha kits specd similarly to HW targets)
Development Kits (these are the white and black consoles that look like retail units)
Other PCs (in these cases, like the drama around the PC with the nvidia GPU), we asked developers to make sure what they were showing was reflective of what could be achieved on Xbox One.
I think we were pretty open about it. Some may disagree, but I dont recall us trying to be particularly cagey about this since its typical for this point in the console to have game development being scattered.
At this point, just about everything is running on near final Hardware. Whats unique about our program this time is that Dev Kits and Retail Kits are exactly the same.
Despite the belief, our Dev Kits DO NOT have 12gb of ram. They have 8gb, just like shipping units. So anything you see running on a black Xbox One console is the same unit were going to ship.
Now, the reason I say near final is because you guys like us to be precise. Anyone that knows HW development understands that millions of units dont come flying off the assembly line by just flipping a switch (see what I did there?)
You have many, many units that are run on the factory production line before final product starts as youre testing quality, tweaking the manufacturing process, etc. But all these consoles youre seeing are coming off factory production lines. Thats why I caveat near final because, before you start full production, you go through many test runs.
So again to clarify we have real, retail consoles running real code. Every time you see a black box running software, its the real thing. I had almost 300 people see the dash demo at Gamescom, and people were free to inspect the HW I was demoing on.