Did you also miss the fact that the quote above is all about the Development Kit? As far as I know, the development kit and final console specs are different. I have seen many a development kit look way different to the final customer product. Hell, MS was using PC hardware as development kits(ala Halo).
Well there's no doubt that the dev kits still seemed to have optimizations needed, it still doesn't mean the user end product shown in Dec 2019 and March 2020 to DF and others was not near or the final customer production product. I mean if they were still trying to develop the final user product in June 2020 and then having to get the assembly line ready to build the final product so that they have enough final units for launch in Nov(or in your case the rumours you heard about August 2020 that being two months), I find it hard to believe. Especially in these Covid time which would have complicated things even more.
I would think MS and Sony would have had the assembly line designed finished and near ready for production in the Feb to April time frames, then had to do tests to confirm that units made from the assembly line were up to specs, then in June/July timeframe started the production of the final product.
There was news that Sony had a new Assembly planet in production that could generate a PS5 every 30 secs. That's 2 console per minute. 2x60(hour)x24(day)x30(If fully robotic and running 24/7) = 86400 units per Month. Now if they had 10 of these plants working(as far as I understood the report, this was the first production plant that did 30 secs per unit, not sure how many Sony actually has producing PS5), that's 864000 units per month. So if they started in June, then up until October there were be almost three and a half million units built. Then at that point they would have to start shipping said units to the different countries etc. By Nov that number increases to over four million units.
Now I know the Xbox looks easy to assemble, but how much have they really produced per minute because I haven't seen any numbers thrown about. So I will stick to the magic 30 sec per unit number I used for the PS5, which we know is speculative since not all production facilites used by Sony could deliver a PS5 every 30 secs yet the numbers shown and the numbers Sony was touting by March 2021 (seven million units) seem to corrolate. So either Sony have more production facilities or they have converted at least ten to produce PS5 every 30 seconds.
I would suggest the same for MS production plants.
That leaves me to doubt that MS was still planning changes to the final XBSX design in June 2020 as you seem to suggest.
In my opinion, MS and Sony would have had to have completed the final end user product design by latest March/April 2020.
*edit* Seems the 30 sec production of Sony's consoles was actually for the PS4 units. Would they have been able to convert the production for PS5 and still have had 30secs per unit?
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/7361...aystation-console-every-30-seconds/index.html
That would suggest that if there's one console built every minute, 20 production facilities would have to be built to get to the same amount I mentioned. Do Sony and MS have 20 or more production facilities around the world?