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Kodebae
Kodebae

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Apple M1 MacBook App Installation Guide

If you're a Mac lover and developer like me I bet you just assumed that the new M1 chip was compatible with your developer lifestyle. Well if you have tried to install Homebrew recently you learned that we were sadly mistaken in assuming the new M1 chip was out-of-the-box developer-friendly but, fret not. Follow my instructions below and you should be up and running in no time at all.

Let it be known that you will 100% need to install Rosetta2 before you can install Homebrew. And you should also know that Homebrew will be the easiest way to install Intel apps on your machine. The reason you will need to install Rosetta2 first is that Rosetta2 will allow you to run the Intel apps on your computer. At the time of writing this post, M1 Macs do not run Intel apps on their own. I will link an article for you directly below that gives detailed instructions on how to install Rosetta2 on your machine.

Do not, I REPEAT, DO NOT try to install Homebrew before you install Rosetta2. Side note this install might take a while. So pour a cup of coffee and wait.


How To Install Rosetta2

Now that you installed Rosetta2, you will need to follow the steps in the video directly below to install Homebrew. Please note that I did follow the steps in the video, but I did not use the audited script provided by the YouTuber. I will post the command I used below instead. One more thing, this one WILL for sure take a while. So pull up a chair, and wait.


How To Install Homebrew

My Script To Install Homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)
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NOTE: Why didn't I use the audited script provided in the Youtuber's description? I did try to use it, but it just didn't work for me. So I used the line of code posted above that a fellow developer sent to me. Once I got Homebrew installed I first used it to install Python3. To do that I entered the following commands into the terminal one at a time.


brew doctor *(return)

brew search python3 *(return) 

brew install python3 *(return)

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Python installed fine for me after that. THERE you have it! You're Homebrew should be ready to install whatever you need it to now. So do you still need more help setting up the rest of your packages? Then watch the videos below next. The videos will walk you through the rest of the M1 Macbook setup.

More Videos: I have a few more resources for you to install even more Intel apps on your machine. Just skip the lengthy intros, unless you like that sort of thing. ;)

Thanks for reading!
**(waves bye)

Kodebae πŸ˜‰

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M1 Setup for Software Engineering

How To Install Intel Apps M1 Mac

Top comments (15)

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codebyline profile image
Yumei Leventhal

I may be wrong, but it seems to me Python3 comes preinstalled in MBP M1. If it is, do I still need to install another version of Python3 using Homebrew? I'm asking because it seems my Django apps can't access Python3 and I am reluctant to install a duplicate version (had a lot of confusion with the last laptop).
My query results via the Terminal:
MBP21:~$ which python
/usr/bin/python
MBP21:~$ python --version
Python 2.7.18
MBP21:~$ where python
/usr/bin/python
MBP21:~$ python3 --version
Python 3.8.9
MBP21:~$ which python3
/usr/bin/python3
MBP21:~$ where python3
/usr/bin/python3

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kodebae profile image
Kodebae

Hi Yumei, πŸ‘‹πŸ½ Humm, I'm not sure about that. This post was originally made when the M1 chip first debuted and I don't know if that was the case back then. But please share any updated recommendations in the comments with everyone. This information, like most technical related things will definitely need to be updated to keep it current and useful. 😁

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Yumei Leventhal

Your post was very helpful. My issue was resolved, but I'm not sure I can clearly identify what resolved it--the last thing I did was restarting the Terminal lol. I was trying to work on a project I'd started on another MBP, so I re-created VENV. Python3 does seem to come preinstalled--I didn't install it and didn't think to check specifically for Python3.

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kodebae profile image
Kodebae

Well that's really good to hear! I'm glad your issue is resolved. Restarting the Terminal is always a good idea, I do that sometimes too. I didn't know that Python3 is preinstalled now. I wonder if that is because of Monterey iOS. If you ever figure out what resolved your issue please let me know. :)

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Yumei Leventhal

Update: Though Python3 did come with my MBP, Visual Studio Code wasn't happy using it and gave me an error. So I hadn't resolved anything after all 😬 So I followed the steps you outlined and installed Python3 using Homebrew. The only change I made was brew install python3 instead of brew install python3 *. The * at the end threw an error (No available formula with the name "Applications".)-not sure what that meant. Bottom line: Python3 was successfully installed. Thank you!

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kodebae profile image
Kodebae

Yay! Success! I'm so happy that you got it all figured out! Glad my post could help. πŸ˜ƒ

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Mochamad Iqbal Dwi Cahyo

The homebrew was already support M1, any reason why we still have to use Rosetta? Afaik, when installing at Rosetta2, all of the package we try to install (e.g: brew install zulu-jdk8), it'll try to download the intel version instead of arm, (e.g: ==> Downloading https://cdn.azul.com/zulu/bin/zulu8.56.0.23-ca-jdk8.0.302-macosx.dmg). Otherwise if we install homebrew and use the arm version, it'll: ==> Downloading https://cdn.azul.com/zulu/bin/zulu8.56.0.23-ca-jdk8.0.302-macosx_aarch64.dmg (expected to download the aarch64 package instead)

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Kodebae

To be honest I don't know. I can't say for sure since I don't have access to your computer and I can't see what you see. This blog post really depends upon the individual and when they buy their M1 Mac.

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Johan Ruiz

Helped a lot! Recently upgraded and this was my guide to getting Homebrew up and running again, cheers!

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Kodebae

Awe, thank you so much! I have another video I'm going to share that also helped me get more stuff installed as well. I'll update the post.

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James Robert Perih

PERFECT! Thank you! This helped me get started straight away on the M1 MacBook Air, without having to deal with Big Sur Intel Homebrew shenanigans! Keep rockin it!

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Kodebae

Thank you so much James! <3 More to come soon. :)

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Sveinbjorn Palsson

Homebrew just installed on my m1, natively, without any hiccups. I guess I'm in the future :)

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Kodebae

Yes you are in the future. πŸ™‚ Either that or maybe they fixed the instillation issues already.

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Kodebae

I updated the blog with more videos on installing more intel apps on an M1 Mac.