I cannot install Python 3 on a new MacBook Pro

Can you explain why not? I installed it without issue on both an M1 and Intel Mac.

Any error messages or other indications?

How are you going about installing it? If you are not using the download from python.org, that could be the problem. There are a lot of suggestions to use homebrew or some other package manager. I don't understand why.

There are two alternative approaches to installing Python3 and you must be the administrator to do so in either case:

This:

Download the current universal binary macOS Python3 installer (3.11.1) from Python.org. It is a proper package installer and will create a Python 3.11 folder in your /Applications folder, /usr/local/bin/python3, /usr/local/bin/idle3 and /usr/local/bin/pip3 with links to the /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/bin/binaries.

Change your Shell PATH to:

export PATH=".:/usr/local/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/bin:${PATH}"

and preface your Python scripts with:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

Or…

Install the XCode CommandLine Tools from the Terminal. This does not install Xcode. It does install Python3 (3.9.6),

idle3, and pip3 into /usr/bin. It also installs clang, clang++, and swiftc compilers along with swift.

./xcode-select --install



Same script preface as above.