Raspberry Pi 500+
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Raspberry Pi 500+
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Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#2> 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.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#3Oh man! It has a REAL keyboard! TAKE MY MONEY!
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#4Oh man! It has a REAL keyboard! TAKE MY MONEY!
For those who don't read through the specs, it uses Gateron KS-33 low-profile 'blue' switches (though the plastic on the Pi 500+ switches is grey, not blue).
In my testing, the keyboard was between 55-60 dBa from about a foot away. Not quiet, but so much better to type on than the Pi 400/500's chicklet keyboard that came before.
It's a mid-tier mechanical keyboard with low-end desktop performance. So it's not going to move the needle if you're satisfied with an N150 mini PC and a cheap keyboard. But if you were already thinking of buying a Pi, or you like the keyboard-computer aesthetic, this is now the top-end for that (especially considering the 16 GB of RAM).
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#5Oh man! It has a REAL keyboard! TAKE MY MONEY!
For those who don't read through the specs, it uses Gateron KS-33 low-profile 'blue' switches (though the plastic on the Pi 500+ switches is grey, not blue). In my testing, the keyboard was between 55-60 dBa from about a foot away. Not quiet, but so much better to type on than the Pi 400/500's chicklet keyboard that came before. It's a mid-tier mechanical keyboard with low-end desktop performance. So it's not going t…
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Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#6> 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,…
> QL-looking for the Spectrum
I was going to object, but probably right to just skip the horror of the true Spectrum keyboard.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#7Holy 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.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#8Nice Tenacious D quote
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#9Nit: 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...
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#10> 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.