Raspberry Pi 500+ All-In-One PC Packs A Mechanical Keyboard, SSD & Affordable Price
How fitting that Raspberry Pi Foundation chose a throwback Thursday to unveil its Raspberry Pi 500+, an all-in-one PC that gives off some serious Commodore 64 vibes. Or as the Foundation puts it, the Raspberry Pi 500+ is a "love letter to the machines of our childhoods." It's also the company's "most polished product yet," which is not an insignificant claim, given that Raspberry Pi models are some of the most polished single board computers (SBCs) on the market.
At its core, that's also what this is—an SBC built on the Raspberry Pi 5 platform with a 2.4GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor with 2MB of shared L3 cache, dual 4K display output, dual-band Wi-Fi, and a host of other goodies. Like the C64 of yesteryear, however, it all comes wrapped in a keyboard chassis.
The Raspberry Pi 500+ is a little sleeker in design, with the benefit of decades of innovation and tech advancements to tap into. It also sports mechanical key switches, and specifically Gateron KS-33 Blue switches with a custom RAL 7001 Silver Grey stem for satisfying click sounds.
Part of the sleekness is owed to being a low profile keyboard, though it's still somewhat a chunky monkey like the C64 was back in the day. Individually addressable RGB LEDs are part of the package too, "and with an RP2040 running QMK as the controller, a Doom port to the keyboard itself is surely just a matter of time," Raspberry Pi Foundation says.
The custom-designed low-profile keycaps have been spray painted and laser etched so the backlighting can seep through. However, if you're not a fan of low-profile planks, you can swap them out for different (and taller) keycap sets. It even comes with a key puller.
Other core specs include 16GB of LPDDR4X-4264 RAM, an internal 256GB Raspberry Pi SSD (the system supports M.2 NVMe SSDs up to the 2280 form factor, and notably, Raspberry Pi recently launched its own 1TB SSD), Bluetooth 5.0 and BLE, gigabit ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 port, a horizontal 40-pin GPIO header, and dual micro HDMI ports.
It's basically an upgraded Raspberry Pi 500, with the plus model adding an M.2 socket with supporting circuitry, a 256GB SSD with Raspberry Pi OS preinstalled, and mechanical key switches.
"Many of us, like many of you, are children of the 1980s home computer revolution. When we’re designing new Raspberry Pi products, we naturally look back to the computers of our childhoods: the tastefully beige BBC Micro, the Sinclair Spectrum with its rubber keyboard, the Commodore 64 'breadbin', or the grandfather of them all, the Apple II. The original Raspberry Pi was a worthy successor to these devices despite lacking a case and a keyboard, but we always had an ambition to build something more complete — more finished — for our education and hobbyist customers," Raspberry Pi Foundation states in a blog post.
Mission accomplished. The Raspberry Pi 500+ carries a $200 MSRP and is available now. There's also a Desktop Kit ($220 MSRP) version that comes with a Raspberry Pi mouse, Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C power supply, a 2-meter micro HDMI-to-HDMI cable, and a copy of the Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide, 5th Edition.
