Rapspberry Pi announced a new microcomputer last September, bringing a slew of new features and performance improvements along with it. This time around, they’re using it to power their newest keyboard computer in the form of the Raspberry Pi 500.
Billed as “the ultimate compact PC experience,” the device crams a full Linux computer inside a keyboard form factor, much like they did with the Pi 400 from a few years ago. Just plug in a monitor, a mouse, and whatever other peripherals you need to get yourself a proper desktop setup that you can use for work, school, and all sorts of other productivity tasks.
The Raspberry Pi 500 is equipped with the outfit’s Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer, which features a 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex A76 CPU, VideoCore VII GPU, and 8GB of DDR4 RAM, giving this some decent computing power. They also throw in a 32GB microSD card in the memory slot for storage, which you can replace if you want to use cards with larger capacities, although you can also use the USB slots to hook up additional external storage. There’s no onboard hard drive or SSD on this thing, so an external drive is most likely something anyone getting this will need if they want to do any serious work on it.
The keyboard itself features a standard tenkeyless layout with 78 keys, so it doesn’t have the separate cursor control and number pad sections you find on full-size keyboards. From what we can tell, it uses membrane switches, so there’s none of that clicky mechanical action some people might prefer, although this quiet keyboard should be more in line with what you can get from most typical PC setups.
The Raspberry Pi 500 gets a full row of connectors in the back, allowing you to hook up all sorts of accessories and peripherals. Our favorite are the two micro-HDMI ports, making it usable for dual-monitor setups, with each port rated to support 4K images at 60 fps. There’s USB-C for hooking it up to a power source, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, a horizontal 40-pin GPIO header, an Ethernet slot, and, of course, the memory card slot. It comes with dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless connectivity, so it feels like a proper modern PC. We’re guessing the included SD card is pre-installed with the outfit’s Raspberry Pi OS, a Linux distro based on Debian that’s been optimized for the outfit’s hardware.
Even better, the company is offering a full desktop setup to go with their new keyboard computer. As such, they’re also releasing the Raspberry Pi monitor, which features a 15.6 inch IPS display with full HD resolution, 16.2 million colors, and 250 nits of brightness. It also gets dual front-facing 1.2W speakers, support for 96kHz sample rates, an integrated angle-adjustable stand, and VESA compatibility, so you can use it with the plethora of VESA mounts out there if using the included stand is not exactly to your liking.
The Raspberry Pi 500 is available now, priced at $90 for the keyboard PC and $120 for the desktop setup, which packages it with the monitor, a wired mouse, and a 27W USB-C power supply.
