Get Snow Leopard early: Build 10A432 is the Gold Master

Friday, August 28th will be a big day for many Apple fanboys. That’s the day Apple’s newest and much anticipated release of the Mac OS X operating system, titled Snow Leopard, will be available officially. As before to help the company’s huge developer community with making sure that 3rd party apps run seamlessly on Leopard, Apple did provide pre-releases through Apple Developer Connection (ADC).

On August 12th Mac OS X 10.6 build 10A432 became downloadable, a 6.13 GB DVD image file. This version has quickly been rumored to be the so called Gold Master, or in short, GM release. The GM version is the one that ends up on the retail disks this Friday.

Unfortunately no official Apple resource ever confirmed or denied that build 10A432 is in fact a GM release and quickly other rumors spread stating it’s not. Passionate Apple users who couldn’t wait – and this includes our very own Zee and myself – started installing without further hesitation to get our hands on Leopard as early as possible.

Well, the wait is over.

Thanks to Mac Rumors we can now be sure that the ADC seed is in fact the one which will likely be shipped to more than 5 million users during the September quarter. A spanish user who got his hands on a Snow Leopard retail DVD did a clean install and confirmed the build number to be 10A432.

And in case you’re still feeling somewhat unsure: While Apple makes no official statement with respect to this topic, official Apple resources did confirm earlier this week, that in case the retail version will be a different one, ADC build 10A432 can be upgraded seamlessly via Software Update.

Lucky Zee, lucky me. If you can’t wait two more days, go find an ADC member near you and start downloading now!