Design freeze for the cam will have happened a loooong time ago. Software edits can change up to a much later stage than hardware obviously and clearly all these companies have a policy of ongoing development, but the camera as it is now is essentially the camera that it will always be. (smallish bug fixes and unannounced factory-installed firmware updates possibly excepted - this is normal).

"so I suppose production started / will start soon." ?!?!
- it'll have started probably ages ago (prob several months). To produce thousands of units and ship them globally takes really quite a while !!

Nobody at Canon or Sony is about to push a button to start production on these cams.....