I'm not going to comment on the specs of course. But there are couple things in here that I felt Brad took a pretty hard stance on which would be counter to my experience.
First, Sony and Microsoft know exactly the prices and specs they intend to launch, and they know it before a contract with AMD is ever signed. An enormous amount of diligence is done on a process like this internally - and figuring out the pricing and specifications of what you can build are, like, fundamental to the whole process. It's literally Step 1.
The reason is they have modeled the entire architecture and are building system components in parallel - not in series. So they have to know roughly where everything will land so that the motherboard, cooling system, case design, fan speeds, radio antennas, and countless other components all land to support the intended price and performance targets. Margins on console are super thin so there is not a ton of room to make major changes late in the program.
Now - things can change. But those changes are almost always in the margins. In the case of the Xbox One for instance, the entire case and cooling system was way overdesigned (obviously given the size!) which allowed the team to increase the clock speeds after the initial parts were tested. This was not part of the plan, and had the case been designed to precisely hit the target there would not have been the headroom to change the clock speed. And on top of that, there was a huge amount of time spent calculating the cost of that change - because even something as small as a 10% clock increase could have more than a 10% yield implication both at launch, and over the long term. So these things are not taken lightly.
So I think it's important to know that specs and prices are set pretty early in the process. Yes, things can change and evolve, but it's generally small tweaks because the implications of doing a major change late in the process are very risky. This is why any idea that Xbox One X made any change or reaction based on the Pro shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the timelines HW works on.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/ne...ecret-sauces-spicing-2019.91830/post-18292022