As someone who has both the X1 and PS4 devkits on my desk, it's interesting to me that Sony actually goes through the effort and massive cost of developing a separate SKU, where the devkit is a huge machine with extra cooling, more ram, more ports, and then the X1 is exactly the same as a retail unit, just with a different certificate installed on it.

But yes, theoretically, "anyone" can buy a devkit and have access to the full architecture of PS4/X1 is they want to.

How would you compare the experience of working with the two?

I had the same a year or two ago - both sets of kit have similar specs and design principles, so most of the differences were in the tooling and APIs.

At the time, PS4's tooling seemed much more polished/complete/reliable - I only needed to resort to the command line interfaces for integrating with our existing custom tooling, and CI processes, exactly as you'd hope. The APIs were mostly solid, retro, C style APIs - with sane error handling, few edge cases, and no callback hell.

I'm sure the XB1 has caught up somewhat in the tooling department at this point. Also, you may already support D3D11, and get to reuse a lot of code there. Not so much reuse with other WinRT APIs (for Win8/10 apps) although the APIs feel very similar.

> Um, that "open SKU" always exists - it's called the developer unit and can run any binaries so as a developer you can run your own game during the process.

Manmal seemed to be positing some kind of mass access semi-open SKU that didn't completely defeat the purpose of having a closed SKU in the first place. I'd argue that mass access to devkits would defeat the purpose of having a closed SKU in the first place.

I suppose you could argue I should've said "developing a third SKU is expensive", though.