Raspberry Pi’s keyboard-computer format — a full single-board computer built directly into a keyboard housing — has always read as more of a charming curiosity than a serious daily driver. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is the version that closes that gap, built on the same Broadcom BCM2712 platform as the Pi 5, but with the specs to back up actually using it as a primary machine.
Watch: Raspberry Pi 500+ — A Full PC Inside a Keyboard (YouTube)
What’s different from the standard 500
The 500+ steps up to 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD via an internal M.2 socket — a real jump from the base 500’s more modest configuration — while keeping the same 2.4GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, dual 4K display output, and dual-band Wi-Fi. The keyboard itself gets the more meaningful upgrade for daily use: Gateron KS-33 Blue mechanical switches with custom silver-grey stems, removable keycaps, and individually addressable RGB LEDs driven by an onboard RP2040 microcontroller, with six lighting presets accessible directly from the keyboard.
Why the price jump is the actual story
At $200, the 500+ costs roughly double the standard Pi 500’s $90 — a genuinely steep premium in a product line whose entire identity has been built around affordability. Reviewers have been split on whether that premium is worth it: the NVMe storage and 16GB of RAM make it meaningfully more usable for real workloads than any previous keyboard-computer Pi, but it also pushes the product well past the price point that made the format’s appeal obvious in the first place — cheap, hackable, disposable-feeling hardware you didn’t feel bad experimenting on.
Where it actually fits for creative and maker work
For anyone doing physical computing or generative art work who wants a single, always-on Linux machine sitting on the bench — running a sensor rig, hosting a small local model, driving an installation’s control software — the 500+‘s NVMe speed and RAM headroom put it in a genuinely different category from the RAM-constrained Pi boards this kind of work has historically had to make do with. It’s a harder sell as an impulse purchase than the $90 500, and an easier one as the computer actually doing real work in a studio.