Can't install psychopy package using pip on M1 Mac

origin: https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/problem-with-mac/28807/8?u=maiyunfei2000

It’s probably due to the psychtoolbox is not compatible with ARM chip Mac, though I can use the PsychoPy App with keyboard setting ‘pyglet’ instead of ‘psychtoolbox’.

I think it’s necessary to be able to run psychopy purely in command line tools. It will be much more convenient sometime.


Environment: MacOS 12.3.1
PsychoPy version wanted to install: 2022.x


The error message was too long to post. I can send a txt file via email if it’s needed.

I think the easiest way to handle this problem is to skip the installation of psychtoolbox package et cetera if the device detected is an ARM-chip Mac.

If you run the Intel version of Python (at least the 3.8 python - I haven’t tried the others) then PsychoPy and Psychtoolbox should both be working fine on the ARM MacOS machines. I’m not surprised that there are problems with the M1/ARM version - we use a number of libraries that aren’t compiled for that architecture and I’m afraid we aren’t in a position to change the way third-party libraries release their libs