Hands On The Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor have been released just in time for Christmas. The machine itself is an undeniably impressive bit of hardware, but the monitor is slightly puzzling.
The Reg was provided a Pi 500 before its release and used it as a daily driver for a few days. It works well and runs swiftly – subjectively quicker than last year’s Raspberry Pi 5 and far faster than the Pi 400.
Pi supremo Eben Upton attributed the speed increase to tweaks in software rather than hardware. He told El Reg: “There’s quite a bit of raw compute performance uplift (roughly from 750 to 900 in single-core Geekbench, which is a pretty good proxy for general user experience) derived from the NUMA work and other SDRAM performance optimization (refresh rates etc.) … The change from wayfire to labwc for desktop composition also has a significant effect. It’s been a busy year!”
The device looks identical to the Pi 400 and consists of a keyboard with a Pi built into it. At the rear you’ll find a pair of USB 3 connectors, one USB 2 port, a 40-pin GPIO header, and a USB-C connector to supply the 5V of power needed to run the device.
There is also a gigabit Ethernet port, a pair of micro HDMI ports, and a microSD card slot. Inside the box are wireless connectivity chips providing 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0.
This year’s model differs from the Pi 400 in a few ways. The red of the base is now white, the Num Lock key is no longer, and a power key has been added – infuriatingly close to the Delete button. The order of the ports has changed.
Subjectively, there has been an improvement in the quality of plastics. Upton told The Register the builder is using a new keyboard supplier, although the base plastics were from the same vendor. There is also a gloss chamfer around the edge and four rubber feet instead of the two on our original Pi 400.
Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi 500 – click to enlarge
The guts of a Pi 5 with 8GB RAM can be found inside the case, which goes some way to explaining the price rise. The unit will retail for $90 – an increase from the $70 of the previous generation, but more or less in line with the across-the-board increase from Pi 4 to Pi 5. Doubling the RAM and a hike in performance goes a long way to mitigate the increase.
Upton told us the price of the Pi 400 is to drop to $60 (with a Raspberry Pi OS SD card) and $80 for the kit with cable, power supply, mouse, and beginners guide – and the Pi 400 is not particularly slow.
The Pi 500 features a 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU. It uses the same passive heat sink as the Pi 400, but despite the extra performance available, we could not persuade the CPU to throttle under regular use. This is a good thing.
However, we were disappointed to see the Raspberry Pi team had opted not to build the Pi 500 around the Compute Module 5 to facilitate greater upgradeability. Upton said: “We really wanted to hit the lowest possible cost, and of course Compute Module inherently introduces some additional cost versus a full-custom design.”
There are also markings and placeholders on the Pi 500’s board hinting at future possibilities. While there are no connectors, there is space for an NVMe card, and what looks like somewhere that PoE circuitry might go. Considering the name, could the Raspberry team have aped the Commodore Amiga 500 and added a trapdoor into the base for expansion?
Raspberry Pi 500 disassembled (source: Raspberry Pi) – click to enlarge
“A trapdoor would be fun, but (as with SSD support) it’s extra cost and mechanical complexity that we didn’t want to load into the design,” Upton conceded.
Describing the Pi 400 as a “conviction product” and “a shot in the dark,” he declared: “Raspberry Pi 500 is about meeting a known demand. We learned that there’s a market for this form factor, as an auxiliary PC for power users, and for more cost or power-sensitive users, particularly in educational and developing-world markets.
“We’ve intentionally tightened the margin because this is a ‘mission’ product: in a lot of ways it’s the ultimate realization of our aim to make a worthy successor to the BBC Micro for students and enthusiasts.”
The Pi 500 is a bit more than that. For many users, it could easily be a main PC – even with the 8GB RAM. However, don’t hold your breath for a 16GB version.
The extra performance and memory also raise an intriguing question: Could it run Windows?
“We’ve had very cut-down Windows 11 working on the platform, but there are driver issues – particularly around DirectX and multimedia acceleration, which would require Microsoft support to resolve,” Upton explained.
“Never say never, and we’d definitely commit some of our engineering resources to a Microsoft-supported effort, but no sign of that to date.”
According to Upton, tens of thousands of units will be available at launch, although only in US and UK keyboard guise. The rest will follow in the early part of 2025. The Pi 500 will also be available as a single unit, for $90, or as part of a desktop kit containing the computer, a mouse, power supply, HDMI cable, and beginners guide, for $120.
The Raspberry Pi Monitor
The Raspberry Pi Monitor – a standalone screen – was also launched alongside the Pi 500. Where the Pi 500 is a logical evolution of the Pi 5 and Pi 400, the monitor is something new for the brand.
Upton told us: “Most of the other screens in this price range are compromised in one dimension or another,” and it is worth noting that there are a variety of other portable monitors available in the market. At $100, the Raspberry Pi monitor is neither significantly cheaper nor more expensive.
The 15.6-inch screen has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and a ratio of 16:9. It has a pair of 1.2W integrated front-facing speakers and a brightness of 250 cd/m2. There’s a sturdy kickstand – which Upton recalled being mocked up in Lego by the company’s design lead during the first COVID-19 lockdown – VESA mounting points, and some rubber feet on the base.
There is also a single HDMI port, a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, and controls for volume and brightness. It will run on 1.5A at 5V and can be powered directly from a Raspberry Pi USB port (although brightness is limited to 60 percent and volume to 50 percent in that configuration) or from a separate (not supplied) power supply.
It’s fine.
However, the engineering of the Pi 500 eclipses it, leaving us to wonder who would want the monitor. It could be bundled with a Pi 500 to recreate a retro-tastic feeling – think the Amstrad CPC 464 or 6128 – of pairing a CPU with a monitor of the same brand. Or perhaps a computer lab could be quickly and inexpensively equipped with an array of computers and screens from a single vendor?
Upton explained some of the thinking behind the screen: “A key motivator was to use 5V power so you can run it off the Pi itself, and potentially run the Pi and monitor from a USB power bank.
“The genesis of this project, way back in the dawn of time, was an Argentinian government tender for low-cost off-grid educational computing, where they were expecting to charge power banks from a generator each evening, and then distribute them to children in the morning. We realized we had something suitable for the compute element, but not for the display.”
We’d contend a bumper around the screen would be useful – the plastics used in the monitor do not feel like they would react well to a careless drop from a desk.
Upton said the Pi team contemplated some falls.
“It’s been subjected to a fair bit of that sort of abuse in testing. Reference drop is 750mm onto engineered wood, which it generally survives pretty well. Sometimes the two halves unclip partially (which is a nice controlled energy sink) but they squeeze back together.”
We also wondered if perhaps Pi might consider evolving the monitor into an all-in-one design, similar to Apple’s iMac. The answer from Upton is a resounding no. There might be larger monitors in the future, but “I think we’ve made our choice that we prefer ‘compute in the keyboard’ as a partitioning.”
That said, Upton did not rule out a Pi laptop appearing at some point in the future, although it was “probably out of scope in terms of our technical capabilities at present.”
The Raspberry Pi Monitor is a curious device, and one that we’d put alongside recent releases such as the USB 3 hub as a thing that is pitting Raspberry Pi against other technology vendors – just without the same level of innovation and design on which it was founded. According to Upton, the monitor has been years in the making and while it lacks fripperies such as a touchscreen, “the focus was on delivering a really first-rate pure monitor at the best possible cost.”
And that’s OK. But we can’t help wishing that perhaps there might have been something more. ®