GM and Public Release Differences?

[Mufasa804]

Hello,

What are the differences in the builds? I have public beta GM (16A320) and App Store public release (16A323) installed on different machines but I could not find the release notes on any of these.

 

[GatorGhost]

I was in the same position that you mention. The one thing I noticed when I installed Sierra on a 5k iMAC was the 16A323 file size was larger by what I guessed at under 100 megabites or maybe a much lesser amount. Also, I saw no release notes, but there is more code in the final GM.

 

[Takuro]

InstallESD.dmg

I was in the same position that you mention. The one thing I noticed when I installed Sierra on a 5k iMAC was the 16A323 file size was larger by what I guessed at under 100 megabites or maybe a much lesser amount. Also, I saw no release notes, but there is more code in the final GM.

I think there are at least a couple very different versions floating around under the same build number of "16A323" which is kind of scary from a code QA standpoint. The best way to tell is to run an MD5 checksum on the "InstallESD.dmg" file that's inside the inside the contents of the installer .app. This is the actual disk image used to install macOS, so if the checksums differ, it's a red flag that they're silently pushing out what are different or differently packaged releases.