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Can anyone explain why dev kits are always so much larger than the release product? I get that some shrinking may occur after the dev kit is released (board rev

Can anyone explain why dev kits are always so much larger than the release product? I get that some shrinking may occur after the dev kit is released (board revisions) and that (possibly) the kits need to support more things inside, but they always seem comically large. For another example, the Nintendo DS (Nitro) dev kit, for example, is also a relatively massive box, but with a full on DS still hanging off the side of it.

ralusek 3y ago
I assume because they need to get in and out, swap things easily, and that making it all fit is probably one of the later concerns.
fredoralive 3y ago
Beyond just having more stuff inside, making something small and stylish costs more in time and money, so dev tools tend to be more functional as they aren’t a mass market product.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  You can amortize that cost by just reusing what work you already are doing for making the actual device.
  - georgemcbay 3y ago
    Dev kits for game consoles typically started shipping well before the actual device hardware did to give external developers enough time to create launch games. It wasn't uncommon for the dev kits to go out a year or more before the console shipped to retail. This is particularly true in the era before consoles were basically just locked down x86 PCs and thus developers needed access to a variant of the actual hardware to port their games/engines.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      That doesn't contradict with my point. There are also logistic advantages in making the device small.
flatiron 3y ago
Release products sell tens of millions. Ever nickel saved in parts or weight is felt significantly. You only make 1K of these so whatever.
- amelius 3y ago
  Then why are developer tools for a MacBook the same size as the MacBook itself?
  - fredoralive 3y ago
    Because Apple don’t release low-level dev tools externally? I’m sure there are some wonderful frankensteins in their labs, but they have less of a need to release them externally.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      An example of an internal Apple "devkit" for the original iPod Touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg62JpqJGBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg62JpqJGBg
    - bangonkeyboard 3y ago
      This was an iPhone devkit: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1102968502581788672/photo/1 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1102968502581788672/phot...
  - et2o 3y ago
    What even is a developer MacBook? Any applied computer can be used
  - oppositelock 3y ago
    The days of tuning software have changed. In the past, these systems were indecipherable and had no good profiling or debugging tools, so they came with a lot of hardware connected which allowed you to profile and tune and debug. If you wanted to profile PS2 code, for example, the way you did that was with a gigantic logic analyzer connected to various traces at Sony's labs. We used their Redwood City lab. You'd give Sony instrumented code, and they'd do some kind of secret magic on it and run it on this instrumented PS3, and a few days later, you get a profile! Downside, this thing is incredibly complex, but on the upside, you had little performance penalty for profiling. Later, these kinds of tools came built into dev kits. For the PS3, programming the Cell was quite difficult and so you had to do lots of tuning. The single PPC core (called the PPU) was really slow, so you had to offload what you could to the SPE's, which were incredibly fast on floating point math, but it was on you to interleave DMA and computation in a way to get good utilization of them. The Dev kits had tools to give you visibility into this. Programming on a laptop only requires the laptop, as you've got all the tools you need in the OS. Only apple does debugging at the board level. It's fun to take a stroll down memory lane.
cmovq 3y ago
Aside from the reasons mentioned by other comments, dev kits include a ton of IO for debugging (multiple ethernet ports, video outs, etc), as well as more memory and storage. IIRC the Wii devkit used an FPGA for the IO controller, and the debug IO board was almost as big as the main board.
logbiscuitswave 3y ago
I’ve used quite a few hardware dev kits in my time. These early dev kits are prototypes —- released long before the hardware or industrial design is finalized. They are made in small batches, often by hand (with bodge wires everywhere), and are highly optimized for disassembly, debugging, and troubleshooting. They often have tons of ports. Early Xbox 360 dev kits were literally a PowerMac G5 with some customizations. Early Dreamcast dev kits were in a mini tower case. Frankenstein appendages are common especially for exotic hardware. I remember using an early Haswell dev kit which was a huge plexiglass monstrosity with a capacitive touchscreen glued to the top. (A later dev kit had a much more manageable iPad-like form factor.) As you can imagine these dev kits are expensive and rare. The hardware manufacturer will want these early dev kits they loan back, and they are almost always destroyed. (A few may slip through the cracks which is how unicorn find like the Nintendo PlayStation prototype was found a few years back.) As the hardware coalesces and goes through the various development stages, subsequent dev kits typically become smaller and more manageable. In some cases they may be nearly indistinguishable from retail hardware without closer inspection.
- dboon 3y ago
  What is the Nintendo PlayStation prototype? That sounds like a cool story
  - lxm 3y ago
    https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sony https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sony and the book “Console Wars”. This is probably the most dramatic betrayal story you can get in business history.
    - endliner 3y ago
      I absolutely love how Sony then trampled over Nintendo by first using their experience from this collaboration to make their own PS, then basically cloned the N64 architecture in the form of PS2.
      - 3y ago
asveikau 3y ago
I think in addition to what people say on this thread, the console vendors also don't want devices resold and in circulation that can run unsigned code to pirate games. So they make them really unattractive to use as actual gaming devices. That maybe is not the whole story, but I've often assumed that was part of it.
- jsheard 3y ago
  Nowadays the devkits require a license key to operate, which only works for a limited amount of time, so when they do slip into the wild it's generally not possible to do anything interesting with them. You can find videos of people playing with PS4/PS5 devkits and they just throw an error that the system has expired and needs to be renewed. They're just collectors items now, unfortunately.

ralusek 3y ago

I assume because they need to get in and out, swap things easily, and that making it all fit is probably one of the later concerns.

fredoralive 3y ago

Beyond just having more stuff inside, making something small and stylish costs more in time and money, so dev tools tend to be more functional as they aren’t a mass market product.

charcircuit 3y ago
You can amortize that cost by just reusing what work you already are doing for making the actual device.
- georgemcbay 3y ago
  Dev kits for game consoles typically started shipping well before the actual device hardware did to give external developers enough time to create launch games. It wasn't uncommon for the dev kits to go out a year or more before the console shipped to retail. This is particularly true in the era before consoles were basically just locked down x86 PCs and thus developers needed access to a variant of the actual hardware to port their games/engines.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    That doesn't contradict with my point. There are also logistic advantages in making the device small.

flatiron 3y ago

Release products sell tens of millions. Ever nickel saved in parts or weight is felt significantly. You only make 1K of these so whatever.

amelius 3y ago
Then why are developer tools for a MacBook the same size as the MacBook itself?
- fredoralive 3y ago
  Because Apple don’t release low-level dev tools externally? I’m sure there are some wonderful frankensteins in their labs, but they have less of a need to release them externally.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    An example of an internal Apple "devkit" for the original iPod Touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg62JpqJGBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg62JpqJGBg
  - bangonkeyboard 3y ago
    This was an iPhone devkit: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1102968502581788672/photo/1 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1102968502581788672/phot...
- et2o 3y ago
  What even is a developer MacBook? Any applied computer can be used
- oppositelock 3y ago
  The days of tuning software have changed. In the past, these systems were indecipherable and had no good profiling or debugging tools, so they came with a lot of hardware connected which allowed you to profile and tune and debug. If you wanted to profile PS2 code, for example, the way you did that was with a gigantic logic analyzer connected to various traces at Sony's labs. We used their Redwood City lab. You'd give Sony instrumented code, and they'd do some kind of secret magic on it and run it on this instrumented PS3, and a few days later, you get a profile! Downside, this thing is incredibly complex, but on the upside, you had little performance penalty for profiling. Later, these kinds of tools came built into dev kits. For the PS3, programming the Cell was quite difficult and so you had to do lots of tuning. The single PPC core (called the PPU) was really slow, so you had to offload what you could to the SPE's, which were incredibly fast on floating point math, but it was on you to interleave DMA and computation in a way to get good utilization of them. The Dev kits had tools to give you visibility into this. Programming on a laptop only requires the laptop, as you've got all the tools you need in the OS. Only apple does debugging at the board level. It's fun to take a stroll down memory lane.

cmovq 3y ago

Aside from the reasons mentioned by other comments, dev kits include a ton of IO for debugging (multiple ethernet ports, video outs, etc), as well as more memory and storage. IIRC the Wii devkit used an FPGA for the IO controller, and the debug IO board was almost as big as the main board.

logbiscuitswave 3y ago

I’ve used quite a few hardware dev kits in my time. These early dev kits are prototypes —- released long before the hardware or industrial design is finalized. They are made in small batches, often by hand (with bodge wires everywhere), and are highly optimized for disassembly, debugging, and troubleshooting. They often have tons of ports. Early Xbox 360 dev kits were literally a PowerMac G5 with some customizations. Early Dreamcast dev kits were in a mini tower case. Frankenstein appendages are common especially for exotic hardware. I remember using an early Haswell dev kit which was a huge plexiglass monstrosity with a capacitive touchscreen glued to the top. (A later dev kit had a much more manageable iPad-like form factor.) As you can imagine these dev kits are expensive and rare. The hardware manufacturer will want these early dev kits they loan back, and they are almost always destroyed. (A few may slip through the cracks which is how unicorn find like the Nintendo PlayStation prototype was found a few years back.) As the hardware coalesces and goes through the various development stages, subsequent dev kits typically become smaller and more manageable. In some cases they may be nearly indistinguishable from retail hardware without closer inspection.

dboon 3y ago
What is the Nintendo PlayStation prototype? That sounds like a cool story
- lxm 3y ago
  https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sony https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sony and the book “Console Wars”. This is probably the most dramatic betrayal story you can get in business history.
  - endliner 3y ago
    I absolutely love how Sony then trampled over Nintendo by first using their experience from this collaboration to make their own PS, then basically cloned the N64 architecture in the form of PS2.
    - 3y ago

asveikau 3y ago

I think in addition to what people say on this thread, the console vendors also don't want devices resold and in circulation that can run unsigned code to pirate games. So they make them really unattractive to use as actual gaming devices. That maybe is not the whole story, but I've often assumed that was part of it.

jsheard 3y ago
Nowadays the devkits require a license key to operate, which only works for a limited amount of time, so when they do slip into the wild it's generally not possible to do anything interesting with them. You can find videos of people playing with PS4/PS5 devkits and they just throw an error that the system has expired and needs to be renewed. They're just collectors items now, unfortunately.