The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released the “Pi 400”, a fully-fledged desktop PC hiding inside a compact keyboard/case. The system is based on the Raspberry Pi 4 board, so it features 4GB of RAM, a quad-core 64-bit processor, and quite a few ports like USB, HDMI, Ethernet, and even a 40-pin GPIO header.
It’s not a beast in terms of performance, but it can push 4K video to up to two screens, so it should be perfectly adequate for web browsing, studying, light office work, and multimedia consumption. In the days of COVID-19, this sounds like a well-needed tool, and the price is only making it better.
For only $70, you can order the product in the UK, United States, and France, while more countries will follow up soon. If you don’t have a spare mouse lying around, you can get the $100 computing kit which includes the Pi 400 computer, a mouse to match the color, the official Pi USB-C power supply, an SD card with the Raspberry Pi OS, a micro HDMI to HDMI cable, and the ‘Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide’ book.
Considering what the wondrous community around the Raspberry Pi has to offer, this product would be an awesome Christmas gift for school kids this year. Children can use the Pi 400 to experiment with networking, electronics, or the numerous projects included in the book and the online resources. In the end, it’s another desktop PC to empower anyone in the house, it’s portable, it’s low-cost, so it’s basically a great value.
The Raspberry Pi 400 is not ushering a new era, but it is re-opening the book of keyboard PCs that were so popular back in the eighties. For sure, this little computer will be embraced and loved, and we will see more from where that came in the future.
