M2 MacBook Pro for Machine Learning

This post will let you set up a machine-learning environment on your new macbook pro M2.

Homebrew

It is very important to get this package manager installed on your macbook.

It installs, updates, and deletes all the packages that you need.

To install it, open the terminal and run:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

After installation, you need to add it to the path to be able to use the 'brew' command.

Once homebrew is properly installed on the machine, you will now be able to start using brew to install and delete packages.

To install, use brew install 'name'

To upgrade, use brew upgrade 'name'

To uninstall, use brew uninstall 'name'

We'll now use brew to install some packages

Docker: brew install docker

Git: brew install git

VSCode: brew install --cask visual-studio-code

Download Miniforge3 for macOS - arm64 chips.

To install miniforge3 to the path, open the terminal and run the following:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh
sh ~/Downloads/Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh
source ~/miniforge3/bin/activate

Restart the terminal and we will create an environment to set up TensorFlow.

conda create --n TensorFlow python=3.8

To activate the created environment,

conda activate TensorFlow

We will now install TensorFlow Dependencies from apple conda channel:

conda install -c apple tensorflow-deps

Installing base tensorflow:

python -m pip install tensorflow-macos

Tensorflow metal:

python -m pip install tensorflow-metal

Create and activate a new environment for PyTorch:

conda create --n Pytorch python=3.8

conda activate Pytorch

Installing the latest version of PyTorch:

pip3 install torch torchvision torchaudio

Installing other common packages on your environment:

conda install jupyter pandas numpy matplotlib scikit-learn seaborn tqdm

To start jupyter notebook in your environment,

jupyter notebook

Import all the libraries to check if they are properly installed:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import torch
import sklearn
import tensorflow as tf
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Yayy! Your new MacBook is now capable of running TensorFlow, PyTorch and other machine-learning libraries.