Raspberry Pi 400 teardown (video)

[Ed.Kloonk]

[floobydust]

It's a USD $70 desktop PC, all in the keyboard:

2x micro HDMI
Gigabit Ethernet
Kensington lock
1x USB 2.0
2x USB 3.0
microSD
40 pin GPIO
2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi and BT 5.0
Broadcom BCM2711 newer rev C0T  1.8GHz
4GB SDRAM
USB-C 5V power in

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pi400/pi400-product-brief.pdf
USD $100 kit https://www.adafruit.com/raspberrypi400

pic from https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-400-teardown-and-review

[ralphrmartin]

I dont understand why they didn't bite the bullet and stick a modest SSD in it too, and make it $99.

[floobydust]

The RPi Broadcom chips are designed to be set top boxes/media players.
So there is no CPU support for mass storage like SSD's with SATA, you only have the SD card and USB drives.

[ralphrmartin]

Sure, I meant use up one of the USB ports. Serious users are going to do this anyway, as SD cards wear pretty quickly with any real use. With the SSD inside, it would be nicely portable. Having to carry the SSD around separately is tedious;  it can get bumped and disconnected. People will grumble when they find they have to spend more money. And so on.

[mikerj]

I dont understand why they didn't bite the bullet and stick a modest SSD in it too, and make it $99.

I thought the same, even if they just provided a PCIE port like they do on the compute module and left it up to the end user to fit an SSD (or some other more interesting peripheral).  Since they stuck with the SD, why not use a full size one with all the rear panel space available?  I can't knock it too much though, it's a really neat little machine.

[Ed.Kloonk]

I dont understand why they didn't bite the bullet and stick a modest SSD in it too, and make it $99.

I thought the same, even if they just provided a PCIE port like they do on the compute module and left it up to the end user to fit an SSD (or some other more interesting peripheral).  Since they stuck with the SD, why not use a full size one with all the rear panel space available?  I can't knock it too much though, it's a really neat little machine.

I was wondering why the shift in PCB layout after all this time making buyers get used to buying/making compatible hats. Why couldn't the keyboard be constructed like a hat, so one could swap out the 'guts' when a faster/better one comes along or you manage to fry the one you have? If you nuke half the inputs on the GPIO somehow, you have to replace the whole thing?