Installing Anaconda on Macbook Silicon Chip

Would the authors provide supplementary instructions for downloading and installing Anaconda on a new MacBook Pro M1 with Silicon Chip processor running Big Sur MacOSX.

Do I:

  1. use the Anaconda MacOS 64-bit Command Line installer with the terminal running Rosetta to emulate an Intel installation and follow remaining instructions as listed in the book.
  2. use the native terminal and the Conda-forge “Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64” installer which is stated to be optimised for ARM-64. I understand this would install a Conda environment with python 3.9 and the ability to install Numpy, Scipy and about another 100 OSX-ARM64 packages.
  3. If your recommendation is (1), would you please provide your reasons for not using the Anaconda 64-bit Graphical installer which would avoid the use of the terminal and seems simpler for inexperienced users.

I would like your advice and detailed instructions on the above as my expertise is limited .

@nevilator Thanks very much for your question!

Most likely the instructions that you are looking for will be issued in the next edition of the book. Because the most recent version available covers iOS 13, the instructions in the book most likely don’t take into account installation on the new MacBook’s running the M1 chip. It is very possible that the authors themselves don’t have the latest MacBook’s, and thus, are unable to provide these instructions as of yet. I do apologize for this, but please be patient, and hopefully the new edition of the book will have the instructions you want. In the meantime, if it is at all possible, and I hate to even suggest this, but perhaps consider running the code on an older machine if you have one available.

Considering we are in 2021 and as stated in the book support for Python 2.7 was dropped in 2020, is it still necessary to rely on Anaconda instead of the Python interpreter shipping natively on macOS to work on the book examples?