Raspberry Pi 400

Raspberry Pi 400. © Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Old-timers will remember the days, back in the 70s and 80s, when most consumer PC were a unit with an integrated keyboard. Remember the TRS-80, the Atari 400/800, the TI 99/4, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Sinclair ZX, the Amstrad CPC, the BBC Micro, the Acorn Archimedes? Well, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s newest computer is a throwback to our old buddies, and in fact inspired by them: the internal project code-name was “Commodore 64” for a while. Now called the Raspberry Pi 400, the computer is based on the Raspberry Pi 4 architecture and components and has 4GB of LPDDR4 memory. The keyboard is identical to the existing Raspberry Pi keyboard. The motherboard, however, is different from the Pi 4, long and spaced out, and covered with a large metal sheet to act as a passive heatsink. This is what has allowed to boost the clock speed of the BCM2711 SoC from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz, making the Pi 400 faster than the Pi 4 (and designer Simon Martin says there’s enough spare thermal capacity left over to overclock). At the rear of the housing are the input/output GPIO, a microSD slot, two 4k30 micro HDMI ports, a USB Type-C port for power, two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 port and a gigabit Ethernet port. The kit bundle (including HDMI cable, mouse, power cable, Pi OS microSD card and Beginner’s Guide manual) is going for USD100 and the computer only, for USD70. At launch, the Foundation is supporting English (UK and US), French, Italian, German, and Spanish keyboard layouts, and promises to support more languages in the near future. Due to compliance certifications, the Pi 400 is currently only available in Europe, becoming available in Canada only in 2021 😞. While you wait for yours, you can reflect on the fact that the Pi 400 is almost one million times more powerful than the Commodore 64 from 1982, at a fraction of the price (the C64 cost USD595 in 1982, or USD1,605 in today’s money). We’ve come a long way!

⇨ YouTube, “Raspberry Pi 400: New All-in-One Pi!”

⇨ YouTube, “The Raspberry Pi 400 Teardown.”

⇨ Hackster.io, Gareth Halfacree, “Hands-On with the Raspberry Pi 400, the first ‘consumer product’ Raspberry Pi.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Jim Salter, “Raspberry Pi 400 review—the under-$100 desktop PC you didn’t know you needed.”

⇨ Raspberry Pi Blog, Eben Upton, “Raspberry Pi 400: the $70 desktop PC.”