The Raspberry Pi 500+ is hot off the press, an all-in-one computer keyboard which is the latest version of Raspberry Pi's hundred series, and the premium version of the Pi 500.
This overview will get into the nitty-gritty of what makes the new Pi 500+ tick, the features and specifications. We'll include links to as much juicy information throughout and at the end of the article.
At a glance, the Pi 500+'s premium features (what sets it apart from the 500) include a clicky mechanical keyboard with addressable RGB backlighting, an increase in RAM, a slightly upgraded silicon revision, and 16GB and an included 256GB SSD preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS.
Let's get into it!
Whats in the box? How does it feel?
We've got the keyboard-only product in front of us; the unboxing experience will only slightly change for those of you with the Complete Kit.
Upon opening the box, we are greeted to the Pi 500+ itself, a key-cap puller and a spudger tool to open up the Pi 500+.
The unit itself seems very sturdy, the plastics used feel good, there isn't any real flex and all around looks great, the all white colour palette is very modern.
Weighing about 600 grams gives it a bit of heft, but without being too heavy.
The Keyboard
One of the main selling points of the 500+ is the mechanical keys. They're nice-feeling clicky, low-profile, in a compacted 75% keyboard layout.
Pulling off a cap, it appears that they are using Gateron Blue KS-33 switches with boxes / stability-rings, which is a great little thing to have. This helps reinforce the keycaps, and I would be more confident to throw this in my backpack and not worry as much about them coming off.
The switches are super clicky, with very little travel and are fast-acting. There are a billion preferences in mechanical keyboard setups, but I feel this is a good one-size-fits-most, a good middle-ground.
Powering it up, we can take a look at those addressable RGB LEDs. Upon plugging in the board, it powers up immediately - the exact same behaviour as the Pi 5. As soon as it is powered on, the FN Key + F4 can be used to change the colour pattern, which includes some solid colours, and some classic "gaming" RGB patterns, and some nice reactive patterns. The colours are nice and vibrant, and the all-white design really helps them pop.
When I first opened the box, upon seeing the power button in the top right of the keyboard, I had many flashbacks to previous laptops with this exact power button placement and many accidental shutdowns. However, we are pleased to report that no matter how many times you press the button, it is nearly impossible to accidentally turn it off. The only risk is holding down the power button for several seconds to force shut it down. The power button turns on the Pi 500+, and when running, brings up the power-off menu.
Whats inside?
Now let's take a look inside of it. The whole thing is held together with 5 screws. With some gentle spudging around the edges, it is quite easy to open! If you are going to open your Pi 500+, be extremely careful not to damage the plastic casing - it is softer than you think! Also, ensure you use the included tool and nothing metal as it may be easier to damage your case.
If you open it, also be extremely careful with the ribbon cable holding the two halves together. This is generously long though, so props to Raspberry Pi (I have performed many laptop repairs where even major companies make it too short to be service-friendly).
On the bottom of the keyboard, we can see that the switches have been soldered in, so it would take quite a bit of effort to swap the switches if Gateron blues aren't your preference. However, the keycaps would be a breeze to swap. I can imagine the hot-swappable inserts would increase the price a ton.
We also spied an RP2042 chip on the keyboard, the same one featured in the Pico Microcontrollers. It looks like this little chip is handling all of the IO of the keyboard.
The main computing, however, is happening in the lower section of the case.
Before we can see anything, we have to remove this great big heatsink - at about 70 grams (with a ton of surface area) it's moving a lot of the heat off the main SoC's - this passive heat sink is massive! We were interested in the thermal performance of this, and even after 30 minutes of an100% artificial CPU load, temperatures were only just above 50 degrees. Under regular day-to-day loads, it would be very difficult to overheat this thing - possibly even with a generous overclock. And because its all passive, the Pi 500+ is completely silent!
The brains
Under the heatsink, we have the main board. It looks a lot like a Pi 5 thats been smeared out with all of the IO on one side, and an M.2 HAT joined on one side.
It looks familiar, possibly the same PCB used for the Pi 500? But with some extra components populated.
The Broadcom chip here is front and centre. It contains the CPU, GPU and also appears to be the D0 stepping. The same stepping that the Pi 5 16GB uses - it's more efficient and allows for a bit more overclocking (should definitely be possible with the heatsink).
The RAM is close by, with 16GB of it to be used. This number has largely become the minimum recommended amount of RAM for a desktop PC, but for a P,i this may be a tad extravagant. However, there is a rapidly growing list of applications that can utilise this amount of RAM, for example: vision language models like moondream, can easily use a good 7 gigabytes or thereabouts. And if you run any LLM on a Pi, they will chew through this RAM easily.
We can also spy an M.2 NVMe SSD; all models come with a 256GB SSD (2280-sized), with Raspberry Pi OS pre-installed.
At the time of writing, it looks like a full-size 2280 NVMe drive is being used, but hasn't been released as a standalone product. All of the screw mounts are attached, so if you want, you can BYO 2230,2280 or any other standard-sized SSD.
All of the other usual suspects are here: the power management next to the USB-C connector, some internal connectors - debug connector, RTC battery and the RP1 for all of the IO connections - 2x 3.0 USB ports, 1x USB 2.0 port, the 40-pin GPIO.
Also included is a microSD slot, handy for booting another OS, or reflashing the onboard SSD.
Unfortunately, the two MIPI lanes are missing, which usually connect to a camera or display. None of the Pi-Hundred series has featured these - but if they did, it would make for an amazing cyberdeck starter...
Power Consumption
As a final thing, we fired up our Otiiarc to do some precise power consumption tests. When in a desktop environment and idle, the Pi 500+ was using about 2 Watts of power. This is a tad less than the 2.5 watts the D0 chip usually gets; we might have just won the silicon lottery here!
Regardless, we can definitely see that reduction in idle power consumption from that D0 revision. This was, of course, with the RGB LEDs off. When turning on the LEDs, there is a massive spike in power usage up to about 7 Watts - a 2.5x increase in power consumption just from turning on some lights. This really demonstrates how power-efficient the Pi series is.
Our final thoughts
A nifty device, adding the RGB, mechanical keys and SSD really ties the Pi-in-keyboard experience together. One of the biggest takeaways from our Pi 5 vs Pi 4 review was that the Pi 5 is fast enough for use in light day-to-day computing activities. For that to be slightly upgraded, and made portable with a keyboard, the Pi 500 makes sense, and a premium version of that is really nice. Being able to throw it in your bag, or move from monitor to monitor around your house, is such a nice ability for this device, and having access to those 40 GPIO pins makes this a great tinkering tool.
Let us know your thoughts!
