Almost five years after the release of the Pi 400, Raspberry Pi is renewing its offer with a more complete, more ambitious model.
Unsurprisingly, earlier this year, Raspberry Pi launched its first successor to the Pi 400. The Pi 400 was an almost anachronistic machine that proposed to integrate all the components of a computer into a keyboard... in the same way as 80/90s personal computer manufacturers such as Commodore and Atari, to name but two of the most famous representatives.
Raspberry Pi
"This first successor to the Pi 400 was no great surprise, as it simply took the concept and associated it with the new generation of Rapsberry Pi, the Model 5, launched a few months earlier. No, the real news came just a few days ago with the announcement and launch of the Raspberry Pi 500+, and the "+" clearly makes all the difference. Basically, we're still relying on the Pi Model 5, whose PCB has been redesigned to better suit the machine's format and take advantage of extended connectivity. In fact, we're still stuck with this quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 processor clocked at 2.4 GHz, with 2 MB of L2 cache and 2 MB of L3 cache. However, it is now paired with 16 GB of LPDDR4X-4267, twice as much as the Pi 500. Never before has a Raspberry had so much RAM.
Better still, the storage floor has been completely redesigned, and while the inevitable microSD card reader remains, it's no longer the essential element. In fact, the Pi 500+ relies on a genuine M.2 port equipped with a 256 GB NVMe SSD in 2230 format. This may sound modest, but it already guarantees unrivalled data access and responsiveness. What's more, it will be possible to replace this SSD with a higher-capacity model, since Raspberry Pi has had the good idea of authorizing up to 2280 format for models with the best capacity/price ratio.
Raspberry Pi
For the rest, the Pi 500+ is identical to the Pi 500, with Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity complemented by an RJ45 1 GbE Ethernet port. Three USB ports (2x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0) are present, as are the indispensable 40-pin GPIO and two micro-HDMI ports. However, the Pi 500+ still stands out on the chassis front: it no longer uses the classic Raspberry keyboard. Instead, we're talking about a mechanical keyboard with low-profile Gateron KS-33 Blue contactors. Better still, the keyboard now features genuine RGB backlighting, although, alas, we lose the automatic shortcuts for numeric keypad emulation. Then there's the question of price: at around 200 euros, the Pi 500+ is twice the price of the Pi 500.
