Home > News

Raspberry Pi 400 Is a Complete Desktop PC in a Keyboard

By Laura Tucker
News Raspberry Pi 400 Featured

The Raspberry Pi line has become very popular among those who like to do a moderate amount of tinkering. Now they are introducing something new to the line that will allow no tinkering: the Raspberry Pi 400, a complete desktop PC built into a keyboard.

What Is the Raspberry Pi 400?

Last year the Raspberry Pi, around 40 times as powerful as the original Pi, joined the line. The goal is for it to lead to use that emulates a legacy PC.

With the global health crisis and people finding themselves stuck at home for school and/or work, there has been an uptick in use for the Raspberry 4 this year.

Now that computers are being pushed back into the home, there may not be as much room for them, leading to a need for something that takes up less real estate. Tablets may do all this for you, but certain education curriculum and work situations need more than a tablet.

News Raspberry Pi 400 Keyboard

Classic home computers had this figured out. It was all integrated into the keyboard. There were no separate hard drives and no keyboard cables – only a computer, power supply, monitor cable, and a mouse, depending on how early the computer was. Apple was big on introducing computers that were all one piece, save for the keyboard and mouse.

The Raspberry Pi 400 is explained as “a faster, cooler 4GB Raspberry Pi 4, integrated into a compact keyboard.” You can either bring your own accessories and hook the keyboard up to own mouse and more, or you can buy the whole kit all in one.

It reminds me of my parents’ first computer – a WebTV. It was a complete computer in a keyboard that just hooked up to their TV. It allowed them to check their email and browse the Internet, basically all they wanted to do.

Raspberry Pi 400 Specs

  • Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
  • 4GB LPDDR4-3200
  • Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
  • Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • 2 x USB 3.0 and 1 x USB 2.0 ports
  • Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header
  • 2 x micro HDMI ports (supports up to 4Kp60)
  • H.265 (4Kp60 decode); H.264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode); OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics)
  • MicroSD card slot for operating system and data storage
  • 78- or 79-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant)
  • 5V DC via USB connector
  • Operating temperature 0ºC +50ºC ambient
  • Maximum dimensions 286mm x 122mm x 23mm
News Raspberry Pi 400 Front

Availability

If you don’t want to bring your own, you can get the complete Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit. All you need to supply is a TV or monitor. The kit includes:

  • Raspberry Pi 400 computer
  • USB mouse
  • USB-C power supply
  • SD card with Raspberry Pi OS preinstalled
  • Micro HDMI to HDMI cable
  • Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide

English (UK and US) and French keyboard layouts are available at launch. Italian, German, and Spanish layouts are expected to be available next week.

Does it seem to like we’re going backward with a goal of emulating classic PCs? Read on to learn whether the Raspberry Pi 4 is really viable as a desktop computer.

Image Credit: Raspberry Pi Blog

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.