[kmeisthax]

Modern console devkits don't boot unless they have an Internet connection through the manufacturer's VPN, so buying devkits on eBay is useless now. They started doing this with the Xbox One.

The reason why they did this is because of leakers. The Xbox 360's devkits connected to a separate Xbox Live network called PartnerNet, and anyone who wanted to test Xbox Live functionality - e.g. buying games or DLC - needed to actually upload their game to PartnerNet. This meant that everyone with a devkit got full access to a lot of prerelease games.

There were rings of people with devkits leaking games for gamer clout. The way they got access to the hardware was interesting. Microsoft actually didn't let liquidators touch the consoles[0], but they still needed to dispose of them. The electronics recyclers Microsoft hired didn't do a good job of this, so there was a cottage industry of people taking debug fused CPUs off destroyed motherboards and swapping them onto retail boards. This would give you something identical to a low-spec devkit that lets you run unsigned code and connect to PartnerNet, but doesn't have any of the crazier debug capabilities useful for development.

[0] Notably, the state of Rhode Island tried liquidating the devkits of the Kingdoms of Amalur developers and got stopped by Microsoft

[derefr]

Interesting! Has anyone gone to the effort to jailbreak the devkits + reimplement open versions of any network services the devkit depends on?

[kmeisthax]

No, you're better off jailbreaking retail units.

That being said, most retail jailbreaks also let you jailbreak development consoles anyway. Development and retail hardware is very close to one another, they differ purely in what debug interfaces are available and what DRM gets enforced.