Raspberry Pi 400: A Cute and Compact Keyboard PC That Only Costs $70

Tsing

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Image: Raspberry Pi Foundation



What would you get if you stuffed a Raspberry Pi 4 into a typing device?



The Raspberry Pi Foundation provided an answer to that today with its latest release, the Raspberry Pi 400, which packs the impressive power of a Raspberry Pi 4 into a compact, white keyboard.



According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi 400 is powerful enough to function as a day-to-day system for basic tasks (e.g., surfing the web, editing documents) and is virtually “indistinguishable” from legacy PCs for most users.



What’s really neat is that the keyboard only costs $70, but users who want a more fleshed-out package can opt for the Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit, which...
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As a cool little device I think that's kind of aweasome. As someone concerned about IT Security I kinda hate it. We don't need cloaked devices running around as it is every cellphone can steal enough data to bankrupt a fortune 500 company.
 
It is cute, but in my experience the Pi desktop experience is pretty meh. I haven't tried with a Pi 4 but I've messed around with Pi 2 and Pi 3 with raspbian desktop and ubuntu.

Remember when most keyboards had computers in them (think C64)? And we hated it, we WANTED detachable keyboards because those were cool.
 
Burticus said:
Remember when most keyboards had computers in them (think C64)? And we hated it, we WANTED detachable keyboards because those were cool.
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Right!!! Dang, I remember them days.............Long time ago. :ROFLMAO:
 
Burticus said:
It is cute, but in my experience the Pi desktop experience is pretty meh. I haven't tried with a Pi 4 but I've messed around with Pi 2 and Pi 3 with raspbian desktop and ubuntu.
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It's not bad, but you can tell that responsiveness is really held up by using MicroSD, both in terms of the typical cards available and the interface on the Pi 4. They got USB booting working apparently, though my testing ended right when that came out as my Pi 4 went into service :).

In general, though, it's not really something you'd want to use. Despite being 'fast enough', there are systems for not much more that are several times faster; it's hard to put into modern terms just how 'slow' these things are. The tech used in the Pi 4 is probably around a decade old.
 
LazyGamer said:
It's not bad, but you can tell that responsiveness is really held up by using MicroSD, both in terms of the typical cards available and the interface on the Pi 4. They got USB booting working apparently, though my testing ended right when that came out as my Pi 4 went into service :).

In general, though, it's not really something you'd want to use. Despite being 'fast enough', there are systems for not much more that are several times faster; it's hard to put into modern terms just how 'slow' these things are. The tech used in the Pi 4 is probably around a decade old.
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They are roughly as fast as a core 2 duo, but use less than 5% of the power. They make fine little Linux boxes, and blow the doors off of your typical cable box. For something to run a GUI on, though, I would probably build a cheap 16GB APU based host.
 
Looks like it's for left handed people only ... darn
 
Endgame said:
They are roughly as fast as a core 2 duo, but use less than 5% of the power. They make fine little Linux boxes, and blow the doors off of your typical cable box. For something to run a GUI on, though, I would probably build a cheap 16GB APU based host.
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I agree that the CPUs are fast enough for basic userspace stuff; they're still slow relative to anything modern, as even current embedded Intel stuff is Skylake-based, and the main slowdown you see is with storage access.

That's why I'd really like to see a provision for NVMe storage on the next Pi iteration. Even one lane at PCIe 2.0 would provide a massive all-around boost without adding protocol overhead i.e. through USB or SATA.
Grimlakin said:
As a cool little device I think that's kind of aweasome. As someone concerned about IT Security I kinda hate it. We don't need cloaked devices running around as it is every cellphone can steal enough data to bankrupt a fortune 500 company.
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Well...
WiFi should always be untrusted. In a corporate environment, you have the resources to use a VPN or other means to add a layer of encryption to connections used by authenticated clients. A Pi or any other rogue wireless device shouldn't be able to eavesdrop, and devices used for business shouldn't be connecting and communicating across unauthenticated networks without enforcing some layer of protection themselves.

And the hard-wired infrastructure should be authenticating endpoints at every OSI layer. Plugging a Pi into an ethernet jack should result in an immediate visit from security :).
 
LazyGamer said:
I agree that the CPUs are fast enough for basic userspace stuff; they're still slow relative to anything modern, as even current embedded Intel stuff is Skylake-based, and the main slowdown you see is with storage access.
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In performance per watt (say, distributed computing use case), they beat everything I've compared them to, short of low power EPYC chips, though the Ryzen 5950 may change that. For read access in general, but specifically sequential read, SD cards are fine (use cases like Kodi on openelec / xbian, pihole, routers, etc). Things change when you need to write to the SD card, especially random writes. If possible, set a NFS share for any storage that needs writes as its dramatically faster.

LazyGamer said:
That's why I'd really like to see a provision for NVMe storage on the next Pi iteration. Even one lane at PCIe 2.0 would provide a massive all-around boost without adding protocol overhead i.e. through USB or SATA.
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Looks like they are heading that direction. The Pi 4 compute module has one or two PCIe lanes exposed, I can't remember which.

My hope for the pi 5 in 2 or 3 years is that they use a more advanced node (7nm would be amazing, but I don't think I can hope for that much). Exposed PCIE via connector like the CM isn't a huge requirement of mine, but I would find something to do with it if it happened.
 
The Ars article says it can barely do 720p 60fps, but 1080p/30 is ok. Considering as I have been using an old Pi 2+ as a Kodi playback device for many many years now, the hardware should be plenty capable of 1080p playback. I wonder why 60fps kicks its *** so much. Mine will even play 1080p/30 H.265 HEVC vids although it struggles a lot unless I have a beefy USB power supply on it. 1080p/30 x.264 works all day long, even with less than optimal power supplies (my little travel USB plug is only 1a output and I've read these things want up to 3a for max power).

edit - then again that is Kodi, not linux desktop. With a desktop there is probably more overhead.
 
I'm lost here, Since you are going to need a display too for this, why not just use a cheap *** tablet?
Who is this intended for? I mean, it's not portable either....

/scratchhead
 
Auer said:
I'm lost here, Since you are going to need a display too for this, why not just use a cheap *** tablet?
Who is this intended for? I mean, it's not portable either....

/scratchhead
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Exactly. And you could mount the Pi on the back of the monitor and use $20 wireless keyboard and mouse.
 
Burticus said:
Exactly. And you could mount the Pi on the back of the monitor and use $20 wireless keyboard and mouse.
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plus the sd card the power supply and hdmi cable and you are looking at over $70
 
Im waiting for the ryzen mini boxes to sink in price.
 
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