> 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.

Now someone needs to make the keycaps with the right themes - black with function keys for the BBC, QL-looking for the Spectrum, shades of brown for the 64, and brown with "BELL" on the G for the Apple II.

Oh man! It has a REAL keyboard! TAKE MY MONEY!

Holy smokes, they actually fixed my personal pet peeve of this entire product line: it has an internal M.2 slot. The performance of pretty much any SD card for a desktop workload is poor to say the least, and letting a USB boot device dangle out kind of defeats the purpose of the form factor. But this new model has actual fast internal storage!

P.S. HN mods, consider fixing the submission name. It’s 500+, not 500, and that completely changes the meaning of the article.

Nice Tenacious D quote

Nit: It's the Pi 500+ (the + was eaten up by HN's automated title sensationalism-removal, I guess)

And I've posted benchmark data to my sbc-reviews repo here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/81

Performance-wise it's pretty much the same as the Pi 5 16GB (and can be slightly faster than the regular Pi 500 depending on the task, if it benefits from faster storage or more RAM...)

Since this is the first Pi with built-in NVMe (I'm not counting the Compute Module Developer Kit), I plugged in an eGPU and tested a new 15-line patch for AMD GPU drivers, which seems to support practically all modern AMD graphics cards[1].

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/full-egpu-acceleratio...

> The ultimate all-in-one PC

I object to this labelling: the term “all-in-one PC” has always been used to mean a computer integrated into a screen, to which you must add a keyboard and mouse (or more likely it will be bundled with a low-quality keyboard and mouse). But this is a computer integrated into a (good) keyboard, to which you must add a screen and mouse—and screens are more expensive than keyboards. Even a basic not-too-horrible screen will cost another $80, and the sort of screen you might like to pair with such a keyboard might be double that.

Might be good value for the keyboard alone but too bad they couldn't put anything better than the 7 year old A76 CPU in there. I understand the reasoning, the ecosystem consistency, I know that the price limits how cutting edge the internals can be, but it's still a pity, for my interest at least.

What's the point of this? Where does it fit, who is it aimed at apart from Explaining Computers and good old Jeff Geerling (hiya Jeff!).

Maybe if it has been designed into a retro style case or something?

As it stands it's very hard to see who would want this.

I'm confused by the use case for this. The keyboard gets a cable running to a monitor. Might need a power cable as well but let's assume usbc covers both.

An alternative is a raspberry pi on the vesa mount, or attached to the monitor arm. The cable to a keyboard is now optional, wireless USB being much easier than wireless displayport.

Keyboard can now be flat too.

When is this a good idea?

I keep waiting and waiting for a revival of beige plastic in the tech industry. This would be a perfect candidate.

Depending on what you want to experiment with, a Mac Mini might be far more cost-productive for most people wanting to play with software and servers.

STILL no full size HDMI port?

All the marketing for this advertises it as a desktop computer. What's the appeal of this compared to a cheaper and more powerful N150 NUC, or a used mini PC if it's for personal use where you just need one?

A N150 has about twice the CPU performance, hardware video decoding that isn't crippled, and much more software built for its architecture among other things.

Where's the plus sign in the original title? The current one (with "Raspberry Pi 500") does not make any sense.

$200 and still micro HDMI? No, thanks.

Who is this product for? I've abandoned RPi after the rise of sub $200-PCs on Amazon, which usually come with power supply, on/off buttons, dual full size HDMIs, SSDs etc etc.

Since the original 500 was released, I don't think there is any other major manufacturer that followed, even the Chinese mini PC makers. It feels like nobody really wants this product other than maybe some Raspberry Pi users? If this form factor makes sense, you would expect other people to build similar devices, like what happened after Steam Deck.