Raspberry Pi 400 review

The Raspberry Pi 400 puts a Raspberry Pi inside a keyboard case. It was released on 2 November 2020, and Raspberry Pi OS comes preinstalled on the SD card in the kit. Owners praise the compact all-in-one form factor and the lack of assembly. You connect a display, power it and start.

Raspberry Pi says the board will stay in production until at least January 2028. That helps anyone planning a classroom set or a long-lived desk machine around it, because the hardware stays available for years.

The Pi 400 uses a Broadcom BCM2711 with four 64-bit Cortex-A72 cores at 1.8 GHz. Memory is 4GB of LPDDR4-3200. With that spec, it suits a browser, a terminal, an editor and a few small services at once. Heavy multitasking or memory-hungry workloads will hit the 4GB ceiling first.

Video output goes through two micro HDMI ports, up to 4Kp60. The board decodes H.265 at 4Kp60 and H.264 at 1080p60, and it supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.0. Those specs cover everyday desktop use and media playback. The ports are micro HDMI, not full-size, so check your cables before you plug in a display.

Storage is the clearest limit. The Pi 400 has a microSD card slot and nothing else: no eMMC, no SSD and no M.2 slot. Your operating system and data live on a card, which fits a learning machine or a light desktop. It is a poor match for anyone wanting fast internal storage, because the board has no slot for it.

The wired and wireless options are solid for a machine this small. You get Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 2.4/5 GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5.0 with BLE. There are two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port. Power arrives at 5V over USB Type-C.

The Gigabit port and the USB 3.0 ports suit a homelab terminal that needs a wired connection and a couple of peripherals. Two video outputs also give a dual-monitor desk setup.

The built-in keyboard is the point of the product, and owner opinion is mixed. Reports call it usable and fairly comfortable, but also cheap and spongy. If you type for long stretches, that feel matters more than the spec sheet suggests.

The 40-pin GPIO header sits horizontally on the rear of the case. That keeps the header on board, but owners complain that access is awkward and needs an adapter. If you plan to wire up sensors, HATs or breadboard projects, budget for that extra part. The header is there, but owners find it awkward to reach.

The Pi 400 suits people who want a ready-to-use Raspberry Pi machine with minimal setup. That includes first-time users, teachers and anyone wanting a small terminal or light Linux desktop. It comes with the official Raspberry Pi OS preinstalled, and the long production commitment makes it a safe base for projects that need the same hardware for years.

It is less suited to builders who need fast local storage or frequent GPIO work. The case design and the microSD-only storage steer it towards desktop use more than towards embedded or server projects.