That's a wonderful observation. The form factor is as clever as it is logical. Stuff like this makes me really optimistic for the future of Raspberry Pi (and widespread computing!).
Like getting to the platonic form of a specific type of device.
The Pi 400 is the completion of the idea of an educational computer for kids, IMO. It's not going to compete with a Mac mini or anything like that, and the keyboard is likely not going to be anyone's top choice for a 'professional' keyboard. But it's good enough in all the right ways as a general purpose computer.
Especially for poor kids in Africa/Asia/etc. Hope it will be the "educational iPod" for them.
In reality, the mouse will be on the right, and the cable will have to cross over top of all cables except the ethernet and usbc power. For such a beautiful form factor, it will look like a mess.
Then you've never seen my desk! (About 10-15% of the population is left-handed)
But really, the Pi 400 supports Bluetooth 5. So I expect many/most folks will go wireless for their rodents.
While yes, the BT mouse is going to be the better option, they're pushing the kit-included mouse.
In any case, over the years I have become very comfortable using mouse with left hand as a right hander.
I am right handed and use the mouse with the left, so that I have my right hand "free" to use a pen or the (right side) numeric keypad when crunching numbers.
And I do not (as many left-handers do) "invert" the miue buttons, maybe I am strange/an exception.
https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/23-fun-raspberry-pi-400-f...
So I’m usually right handed, although I still move it around from time to time.
Getting close?
So this makes a lot of sense economically, especially for cash-strapped organizations like schools that have to manage large fleets of machines.
Stuff that isn't touched and lasts long (screens) don't get replaced. Stuff that is touched (and likely to wear out over time) like keyboards or gets out of date due to Moore's Law (computer) is fused into one package, so there are fewer cables to worry about getting unplugged, worn out, etc.
If there’s anything to aspire to its Hewlett Packard’s test and measurement and computing offerings between 1960 and 1990.
Those Brompton folding bikes are pretty well made, though pricey even with the deflated pound.
I'll bet you're thinking of British Leyland, which behaved a bit like Boeing currently does. But much, much worse, and at every level.
British companies that are aware they can fail produce quality just fine. It's a fairly simple tale.
How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into, or even a proper desk to have a desktop computer set up on? Plus they'll need a separate webcam (and I'm guessing finding one that just works out of the box on Raspbian without fiddling around with drivers and such could be non-trivial). This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a $200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly more accessible.
And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning than a laptop?
2) Webcam isn't strictly necessary: You'll be able to "see" your teacher, type in chat, virtually raise your hand, etc.
3) This enables more advanced STEM (The "T" portion, really) not because it's a desktop but because of the built-in 40-pin connector opening it up to the massive catalog of projects that exist for the Pi platform already.
4) Perfect is the enemy of the good: You're complaining this isn't a perfect solution for those lacking resources. It's not. But it is significantly better than nothing, or a phone with a 5" screen and no keyboard.
First peripheral I would sell is an add on breadboard station with lots of good sensors, lights, input controls, motor drivers and such that is buffered to prevent damage and start producing education kits.
What we've got here is something a lot like that. But it has a lot more power connectivity. All the things the simple machines don't have. But it's all still pretty lean too. I'm excited.
yes really, this is nearly spectrum-opposite of a chromebook (desgined to keep you in a prebuilt ecosystem)
I don't feel all that good about developments on things like iPads and Chromebooks. Not for stem type tasks.
5x5 RGB LED matrix, gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer, thermometer, hydrometer, barometer, joystick sensor, all for ~$30 USD
Oddly, this board spots a separate ethernet transformer which does support PoE, but there's no circuity to tap that, and nowhere to add it. Which begs for a modification, but seems like missed opportunity.
The bit I don't get is why use an ethernet transformer at all, especially if they're not reaping the benefit from it.
Not in our school district (Mass), students are required to have cameras on and showing most of their face.
I imagine if I were a kid now-a-days, but with the same hobbies I had when I was a kid for real i'd probably be deep-faking a wobbling face image pretty fast.
That was a fair assertion 1997. Nowadays you will easily find a bunch of computers too.
>The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.
$100 isn't cheap when you're poor.
A poor family that has any sense certainly won't buy brand-new hardware.
When you have to save money, you buy second-hand, which will allow you to buy a fairly modern PC with a magnitude more power than that raspberry PI at half the price.
For instance I could pick this computer up for 1 euro simply because someone wants to get rid of it:
https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/pc-computer-acer...
You can find tons of offers like these if you'd browse your local ebay/craigslist/whatever listings.
Why would someone spend 100 bucks on a new machine?
I meant if they somehow got ahold of one (community program, kind person from across town, local school getting rid of them, etc.). The discussion was more about whether a child in a poor family who gets one can actually use it without any extra hardware, not how affordable $100 is to a family in poverty.
Most parents in poverty don't have the brain space to think about buying one of these for their kids, much less the $100 it costs.
You're absolutely right, and that's why the pi foundation includes schools as a target market. Schools deliver the greatest, and certainly the most equally distributed, value, and cheap computers mean more money to spend on that brain space.
Sure, smarter people can literally dumpster dive and get going. I literally did that as a kid. N9 big deal.
Tons of people will buy this and get a lot out of it.
Wicked, would love to hear the story.
I agree, only would say Apple 2 or C64, Atari...
And I'm talking about households that literally do not have computers. There is no old hardware lying around, much less not just a keyboard & mouse, but the HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, etc. Sure, search craigslist or similar, ask friends/family, you might get by. That's not a scalable solution for 1,000 kids in my school district that lack resources, much less the thousands more in surrounding districts. As with many technical problems, scaling is a challenge, not the single one-off solution.
that's an entirely different argument, which I agree with you on. the original argument was that it's more likely a spare keyboard is lying around than a comparatively expensive monitor (which is more prone to being repurposed)
> mouse, .. HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card
these would still be required anyway, they're not included in the price
let's allow a more realistic $80 delivered
yes, it's a great price for a great piece of kit, don't get me wrong. but if the price is still an issue (as implied by free monitor), it shouldn't be a big exaggeration to expect to find a second hand Pi4 for $40-50
Amazon.com $59.43 + free shipping (1-day w/Prime)
PiShop.us $55 + $7.95 shipping
...so $60 seems very fair including shipping, not to mention this larger keyboard model will cost at least as much to ship.
It does call for a bit of scrounging, but an acceptable used monitor should be twenty bucks or free. Including a screen is optimizing for pessimism: the best you could do is something useless for the majority, and only as good/cheap as the minority could get a new one for.
How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into
Of course, in a multi-kid household, yes - one screen per kid would be needed.
plus they'll need a separate webcam
This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a
$200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly
more accessible.
And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning
than a laptop?
Of course, whether or not this matters depends on the kid and the curriculum. If all the kid's doing is some web-based online curriculum whose needs are perfectly serviced by a Chromebook, then yeah - an RPi device isn't magically going to grant them magical STEM learning powers by osmosis.
Raspberry Pi 400 is what ChromeOS/Chromebooks could have been if Google cared about making computing empower people, rather than seeing it as a tool to manipulate them through adverts.
I've been appalled by wide adoption among schoolkids of Chromebooks. Google promises not to build profiles of kids, but they are still capturing all their online and OS behaviour. The volumes of data captured are unimaginably large.
Pushback and scrutiny of ChromeOS is practically zero in tech circles. In fact it's quite the opposite, as discussed by some in this thread: there's excitement about the thought of porting ChromeOS to Pi.
Tomorrow's headline?
From a quick online search, I could find monitors for $30 - $50 and webcams $20 - $30 which is pretty price competitive with a $200 - $300 Chromebook. The Pi community would help with any driver installation issues, and the Pi setup seems powered up enough to run Zoom with no issues.
Though I do see even cheaper Chromebooks in the same price range, so I wonder why / how districts are not able to provide these to students.
> Component shortages continue to disrupt Acer's Chromebook shipments, which can fulfill only 30% of customer orders, with shipments for the remainders having to be deferred, according to the company.
I have an old one with DVI and VGA, so I have a DVI-HDMI dongle and HDMI-HDMI mini cable and my first dongle didn’t work because the form factor of the monitor case didn’t allow it to fit. Quite a pain.
Of course DVI would rule out old TVs, so I don’t know what the “best” choice is, if there is one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_Unit...
you could just use the pi camera for a webcam, since the port is still there?
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/latitude-14...
These are resources restricted households as well: $200-$250 represents a significant increase over $100.
On the other side, it is perfectly reasonable to let the pupils find a screen on their own, most TVs or used computer screens will do.
Raspberry Pi 400 is fine, but it is not cheapest.
The satisfaction in making a tiny little computer board go is very apparent when you see a kid do it, even if it’s just to make some lights flash or boot into a Nintendo 64 emulator via a console. It all feels very close to the metal but without a great risk of damage.
The only difference I could imagine is "Pi is not a "real" computer, expectations are not high" as it does not run Microsoft Windows.
I agree tablets and laptops are more accessible. But I think when it comes to really learning how to use a computer and realize its full potential you want a proper desktop computer with mouse, keyboard, connection ports. I think it is useful to learn how to plug in different USB devices, monitors etc.
Unlike a Chrome book or Tablet, a "real" computer give you a chance to learn about how a file system works, organizing files into folders. Using multiple programs to work on a collection of files. The single task orientation of tablets make them very user friendly and low threshold but that also limit you in how far you can go.
My kids started out on tablets but now I try to push them more onto using a regular computer.
It would be just like telling kids in the early nineties "this GUI stuff is great and all, but the real way to interact with computers is the command line". Or even longer ago, telling kids "this terminal is nice and all, but the real way to use computers is punch cards".
I also don't think the idea that ChromeOS is too locked down to be a real learning environment for kids really holds up. If anything, it's too open. There are billions of websites out there, and thousands or however many that might be excellent learning resources or sandboxes for kids, it can just be hard to know about them/find them all. But the abstractions are just shifting around, there are plenty of full development environments on the web where you can program and host entire apps. Or you can tinker with IFTTT or Zapier to connect different hosted services and hack them to do different things you make up. There's still a lot of room for creatively using technology, I certainly wouldn't sweat pushing kids onto "regular" computers instead of chrome books or tablets (beyond just a basic introduction to broaden their horizons and let them at least understand that this other paradigm exists).
Finally no way to run headless if you wan't 64bit OS.
It's good computer for r/iamverysmart type of people, but not to be actually productive hacker.
Could you expand on that a bit more? I'm currently running a Pi3B+ 64bit Raspbian headless and have had no problems so far. Does the Pi4 not allow 64bit headless?
I could see a kid plugging this in , doing his homework and after school mom and dad can watch the Pistons.
"Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US".
1) TV is comparatively cheap entertainment.
2) Flatscreens are the only kind of TV produced in years.
3) Is that objectively "a very high priority" for "poor people"? Citation needed.
4) Being poor sucks, and things which make life more pleasant would be a completely understandable high priority.
5) Obtaining things which make life better is a very high priority in all stratas of American life.
And yet the comment ""Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US" doesn't sound filled with empathy, understanding, approval, celebration that even poor people can afford material goods in America, does it?
Instead, somehow, it sounds judgemental, critical, accusatory. In the middle of a thread about a Raspberry Pi which was designed and made to be cheap so that poor kids have a chance of computing access, with the context "even poor people have TVs" who would throw in that comment and why?
From an opinion piece[1]: "The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. [...] Regardless of how they were intended, poor people and minorities sense that with those comments Gingrich is winking — some call it “dog whistling” — at certain white audiences by intimating that black people are lazy, happy to live off the government and lacking any intellect."
That's obviously what happened here. The comment "Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US" does not say "poor people value education and it's a good thing even poor people have access to a TV where they could plug in a Raspberry Pi", it says "of course poor people will have a TV, they're lazy and watch TV all day and feel entitled to the luxury of a flatscreen, right guys?" wink wink, allowing the poster to deny any responsibility because "many poor people own televisions".
The Center for American Progress paper "Moving away from Racial Stereotypes"[2] says "The notion that poor people, particularly poor people of color, are lazy is the most significant and persistent stereotype affecting efforts to address poverty in our country." and "It’s notable that labels suggesting laziness or lack of effort that have been used to describe African Americans are also applied to poor people more generally." and "Getting tough on poor people is a way to try to win votes during elections, derail legislation, or distract attention from positions that would otherwise be unpopular. Given modern-day sensibilities, however, very few single out groups directly—instead of using words like “black” or “Hispanic,” they raise stereotypes and employ code words that let audiences know exactly which groups they are actually talking about without actually saying so" and "Over the years, progressives have contributed to the continued association of African Americans and Hispanics with poverty"
That is, there's a certain demographic characterised roughly by older, white, 1950s, Republican, Fox-News watching, to whom "poor" means "black" and "TV" means "lazy", "flatscreen" means "entitled luxury" and "high priority TV" means "irresponsible" or "stupid", and the whole sentence is completely innocently deniable because everyone has a TV so it's just plain fact and completely innocent.
The only hint is that if it were a completely innocent observation, there would be no need to say it at all, no need to single out the poor, no need to mention "high priority", no need to mention "flatscreen". You'd just say "people who can afford a Raspberry Pi 400 probably have a TV, which is nice". And that was already said one comment before in the chain.
[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/juan-williams/207295-...
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...
Multiple kids -- definitely an issue, but it's still one fewer setups than before.
This post shows some unboxing of Starlink: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=48297.msg2...
I’m really excited about these LEO satellite constellations just solving the rural/urban digital divide. As launch costs continue to go down (SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 has already made a massive difference in making this feasible, about a quarter the marginal launch cost per kg, and Starship should enable an order of magnitude improvement on that) and competition increases (OneWeb has been brought through bankruptcy but is starting to launch again, plus Amazon’s Project Kuiper and the potential of launching on the partially reusable New Glenn), it’s an exciting time for the ending of digital poverty in rural areas.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/broadbandgrants/comments/61B...
"Using the Bells own words and filings, by 2000, approximately 50 million homes should have been rewired with a fiber optic wiring to the home, capable of 45 Mbps in two directions, which could handle over 500 channels of video and was totally open to competition. About 86 million households should be wired by 2006."
Still waiting on that fiber optic connection to my home in 2020...sure would be useful to all the kids that are trying to learn remotely via a damn phone right now.
I recently moved out of the bay area to a my house in relatively rural Oregon. I can't actually work from home though, I had to rent a second house in a nearby town because the best internet connection I can get at my actual house is GEO satellite internet which is far from suitable for work.
I'm only 7 miles down the road from a town of 700, and only ~30 miles from a city of ~20,000, yet I have 0 options for wired internet and 0 cell reception from any provider at home.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's an engineered price point because lesser hardware at lower prices can't even be shipped and make a profit. And frankly, if I remember back 10-15 years, there were $350 boxes back then, too, so maybe it's a minimum price/rule of thumb that was calculated a long time ago.
And back then salaries where much lower even adjusted for inflation. That Amiga had 256 KB of RAM. This Raspberry is just a beast in comparison to what me and my brother had and it costs 31x LESS, in a world where salaries are higher than back then.
I can see this opening up a lot of opportunities for families and schools in less affluent countries. Maybe even businesses. I can imagine various famers and small businesses out in the countryside in Africa or India could benefit from a computer like this to lookup market information for crops, plan budgets, savings, purchases etc.
$1499. In 1994.
I mean, I've had an Atari 65XE myself when I was a kid, but tvs are much bigger nowadays, less accessible and HDMI cables are much more difficult to run through the room (stiffness and length limits are real issues); OTOH keyboards and mice are easy to come by. The hard part of the Pi is the display. The kit also doesn't include a cam nor a headset, nor even a mic. This is super important for online learning. Maybe you could fit in a mic in the keyboard somewhere?
A Pi all-in-one (iPi if you excuse me) or a Pi-book in an affordable price range would be revolutionary. I have an old VGA-only monitor but guess what - no D-SUB on the Pi 400 and a proper dongle would be another... $30?
As is, nostalgia value is super-high but I don't feel it's as practical as one would hope without any kind of display.
The webcam is a different issue, there doesn't appear to be much for a plug and play option for the Pi. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
If these were to be used as an option for remote education, I would hope that the same organization promoting them would also sell a kit with the system preconfigured to use an included webcam.
Doubtless one of the resellers will augment this with a package that includes an inexpensive USB webcam.
How crazy is it that one of the Big Players come in, port their OS to the device, and more or less take it over as just another platform with a Start Menu?
But you know what would be really interesting with these guys - is if they would auto-hive once online - and would just have access to whatever apps were avail - say, you pick a role or profile (switchable) for the unit...
"e-learning box" or "games" or "news" or "community" such roles/profiles
And it would join that hive and then auto pkg whatever apps it needed to to provide access to those communities or content...
I'm old enough to remember buying a 40MB hard drive for $4,000 (about $9,600 after adjusting for inflation).
However, is Pi offering indeed reaching out to the developing countries? Are there any sources that substantiate the adoption of Pi platform in such communities, especially whether there're any lasting effects beyond the inaugural opening and ribbon-cutting, so to speak?
It's tempting to seek the BBC Micro effect from Pi platform, and I hope it can be achieved. Still, one needs to keep in mind that such effect largely was a result of a government policy which supported wide adoption.
They hit this sweet spot of just enough power to be useful, yet totally silent (with a Flirc case on the Pi).
The RPi3b just wasn't quite there yet in terms of speed, but the 4 can easily drive dual monitors and provide enough oompf to be useful in a game jam. Quite a nice little device for hobby development.
Remember OLPC? It was painfully slow, but that was more than 10 years ago.
Seems like you could just repurpose a cheap android tablet...
> Remember OLPC? It was painfully slow, but that was more than 10 years ago.
OLPC may not have been a hit itself, but it seemed to usher in an era of inexpensive low-powered-but-still-useful PCs.
Giving students a $100 phone + $10/mo of cell internet access for 9mos out of the year pays bigger dividends.
Besides the longest essay you have to write on the ACT, SAT or AP tests is about 300 words. You can do that on a phone - kids do it now on paper.
What if kids cram tests on their phones for a few hours then read books the rest of the day? Maybe take your phone outside. Sounds like a decent enough curriculum to me.
Anyway my point is you don’t really need a keyboard in education. And with that the logic of this stuff as an educational policy kind of goes away.
and education should really be separated from the entire phone mobile ecosystem with all the behavioral manipulation that it entails
It reminds me of what Apple does when it redefines a product category by "just" bringing together existing technology into a more convenient form factor and UX.
I don't know if this will quite have that level of impact, but I see the potential, especially now with remote learning: My kids are on a hybrid schedule. I'm fortunate to be able to provide them their necessary computing resources. Not everyone can: The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.
I'm also old enough to remember when you'd be hard pressed to find a desktop computer for under $1000, perhaps $1500 adjusted for inflation. One for $70-$100 really just hammers home how far we've come.