Installing tensorflow on M1 Macs

This blog provides step by step instructions for installing tensorflow on M1 Macbooks with Apple Silicon.

pip install tensorflow does not work on M1 Macs.

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tensorflow (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for tensorflow

There is an official Apple instruction page that I have not tried.

Getting Started with tensorflow-metal PluggableDevice

Tensorflow is available as a different pypi package named tensorflow-macos for M1 Macs. But doing pip install tensorflow-macos resulted in the following error.

ERROR: Could not build wheels for h5py which use PEP 517 and cannot be installed directly.

<--Similar error for another wheel GRPCIO -->

Final Solution that worked for me.

conda create -n tf python==3.8
conda activate tf

pip install --upgrade setuptools
conda install HDF5

# bottom 3 lines for GRPCIO dep failure. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66640705/how-can-i-install-grpcio-on-an-apple-m1-silicon-laptop

export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1
export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1
pip install firebase-admin

pip install tensorflow-macos

Successfully installed absl-py-1.0.0 astunparse-1.6.3 google-auth-oauthlib-0.4.6 google-pasta-0.2.0 markdown-3.3.6 requests-oauthlib-1.3.1 tensorboard-2.8.0 tensorflow-macos-2.8.0