The last time I experienced fail like this was twenty years ago, when I was forced to attempt to communicate with Microsoft for work.
But this is Apple. They're supposed to be different.
In March 2021, I bought a MacBook Pro with the new M1 chip, with an integrated GPU. This means you can do Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on it. On September 17, I finally got it working.
Various people helped me, none of them at Apple. Except for one online chat guy. I was unable to see replies to my comments on Apple's developer site
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/686926?page=1#685386022
which might contain a solution to my problem, because I'd changed my phone number, having moved to a different country (I do that a lot), and the only way developer.apple.com would let me in would be by sending me a code on my old phone. Anyway, the guy on the chat line enabled me to send them a message, and they say they might be able to let me in some time today. No, Apple sent me an email: "You will receive a text or a phone call at this number when your account is ready to recover on October 15, 2021 at 12:23:40 PM." That's in one month.
Meantime, I figured out how to do what I wanted, with no help from Apple.
See
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56604348/how-to-install-tensorflow-2-0-on-mac-or-linux
The instructions at https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos tell you to do this
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/master/scripts/download__install.sh)"
but then this script tells you to run a file which doesn't exist.
Four other developers have the same problem. The last comment is June 3rd. I eventually sent emails to all the email addresses of the contributors I could find listed at https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos, but none of them replied. The repository is now read-only, and archived, allowing no more comments. I doubt if Github would allow just anyone to register github.com/apple, so I suspect it's only for Apple employees.
The world's first trillion-dollar company is unable to support one of its claims about its new computer - that it can be used to do machine learning in Python using Tensorflow. Contrast this with my experience of the open-source programming language Elixir. Every question I have asked at https://elixirforum.com/ got answered within 24 hours by the creator of the language, Jose Valim.
After five months, I did eventually get Tensorflow working as advertised on my Mac M1.
Thanks https://towardsdatascience.com/installing-tensorflow-on-the-m1-mac-410bb36b776
I needed to download from https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases and run Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh several times to get it to install a lot of software in /Users/rod/miniforge3
See also https://medium.com/gft-engineering/macbook-m1-tensorflow-on-jupyter-notebooks-6171e1f48060 who made the following useful comment:
"After publishing the article, someone reached me with this error when installing TensorFlow: ERROR: tensorflow_macos-0.1a3-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl is not a supported wheel on this platform. This happened because Anaconda was installed. As I describe above, Anaconda is not ARM compatible, so the most direct way to solve this is to uninstall Anaconda and install Miniforge instead."
$ brew uninstall anaconda
This made all my other python programs not work, so I had to redirect a series of soft links to point to /Users/rod/minforge3/bin.
However, using Tensorflow still involves using a version of Anaconda - this one:
/Users/rod/miniforge3/bin/conda
And you do conda activate apple_tensorflow before running a Tensorflow program.
The program won't run like this:
$ /Users/rod/miniforge3/bin/python my_tensorflow_program.py
Nor will it from from the command line if you put
#!/Users/rod/miniforge3/bin/python
at the top.
But if you put
#!python
at the top, it figures it out.
$ conda activate apple_tensorflow
$ which python
/Users/rod/miniforge3/envs/apple_tensorflow/bin/python
This is Python 3.9.6
I also got help from https://medium.com/codex/installing-tensorflow-on-m1-macs-958767a7a4b3
At this point, I have to admit part of the delay was my bad. I didn't read the instructions clearly. You have to do the following, in this order, in folder miniforge3/ -
conda env create environment.yml
conda activate apple_tensorflow
pip install --upgrade --force --no-dependencies https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/releases/download/v0.1alpha3/tensorflow_macos-0.1a3-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/releases/download/v0.1alpha3/tensorflow_addons_macos-0.1a3-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl```
conda install notebook -y
conda install matplotlib -y
conda install pandas -y
conda install scikit-learn -y
jupyter notebook
It took me a while to figure out how to push this to Github. I kept getting 403's, even though I'd added a "Personal Access Token" to the URL of this project in .git/config, as recommended in a discussion on stackoverflow.com.
This site got it: https://mycyberuniverse.com/how-fix-fatal-authentication-failed-for-https-github-com.html
Point 6, "Select the scopes, or permissions, you’d like to grant this token. To use your token to access repositories from the command line, select repo."
finally did it for me, after weeks of useless discussion on stackoverflow, and my comments being deleted because they're not "answers", or some other bureaucratic reason.
WTF? A "token" is just an impossible-to-remember temporary password, so you have to keep a copy of it somewhere. It's surely less secure.