While the whole R Pi project has always been intriguing to me, I think they may have a real winner with the R Pi 400. One R Pi 4 (with massive heatsink/steel plate for slightly higher clock speed) built into their very own keyboard design. The basic $100 package with accessories make for a really affordable basic little PC. I'm curious to see how they'll iterate on this one.

I just learned about it last night, I believe within an hour of the announcement.

It certainly looks neat, though you could of course get the same capabilities (with a slightly lower clock speed and worse cooling) with just a Raspberry Pi 4B 4G ($55), a Raspberry Pi Keyboard $17), and a micro-USB cable.

(Then again, what I described above *does* add up to $72 before accounting for the cable (and $72 > $70 last I checked), so there is some minor cost savings.)

Also, one downside to the 400: It lacks the connectors needed for the official Raspberry Pi camera and touchscreen.

I may get one (though it can't quite replace my Pi 4 for Zoom meetings due to lack of a camera, but then again I don't have a stand for the camera, so I don't use it much.)

I have a laptop for work.
I have a desktop for games.
I wouldn't know what to use this new Pi for.
But I want one :D

Ditto. I have absolutely no need for this, but it'd probably make for a neat little toy computer to muck around with.... or play Doom. Lotsa Doom! ;)

Or as zx spectrum clone? Or similar retro gaming consolas? :)

Looks cool. And remembering the Atari800/Apple2/Comadore and other systems where it is built into the keyboard, it is indeed a throwback.

Funny that it went from all-built-together (just add a tape deck or floppy drive), all built into the tower/screen (Apple) to separate components (standard computer today) to laptops (all in one + battery) to just the keyboard again.

Hmmm... You know going to some hotel/motel rooms, they often have a monitor and desk with plenty of space and the like, so you would only need that to plug in.

Few years ago, i tried the Pi B, had a powered USB port to plug it into along with mouse keyboard and it was almost a computer by itself, it just looked a little a mess. But hey, it was workable.

Seems neat. Basically a 4GB Raspberry Pi4 integrated with a keyboard, if I understood right?

However, I personally am not that interested because I want to keep my RPi4 near my living room TV so that I can watch movies with it, and I control it either with a wireless keyboard/mouse or alternatively using AnyDesk or TeamViewer. So using Pi 400's own keyboard is not that useful to me or then I'd need to use a long HDMI cable.

Also it seems to have one less USB port than RPi4, but maybe that doesn't matter as one of my USB ports is reserved for the wireless mouse/keyboard anyway... but then that also needs one port for the mouse, so yeah it is missing one USB port for what I have.

I just wish they would have added 8GB RAM on that as that is what the newest RPi4 has. Anyway, that could be quite a good "mini-PC" for many people as you don't have to buy a case and external keyboard for it, so there are less cables and clutter too.

For me it serves these purposes:

1. A quiet (= no fans) and low power consumption "PC" that is running 24/7, so I don't have to start it in order to use it. I like doing tasks that would normally take a very long time anyway (even days or longer) for which I don't want to keep a high-power and fan noisy desktop and laptop on 24/7 for a long time. Tasks like, I dunno:

- running gogrepoc.py in order to download my GOG games, and verify their data integrity too. This can take a very long time depending how many games you have and how fast your internets is.

- converting a couple of terabytes of my old video files to some better and more modern format with ffmpeg (this can take a VERY long time if I aim for the best possible quality; even several weeks).

- downloading some super-rare and old movie or game from the ed2k/kad network with AMule, where it seems to come at like 5kB/s speed because there is only one source for the file and he/she seems to be online only 8 hours per day, distributing the file

- keeping some kind of server (ssh, ftp, web, your personal file server that is accessible from everywhere even outside your home) online 24/7. (That gave me an idea: is it powerful enough to run some kind of web server? I guess why not? Going to google for that.) EDIT: Bingo! Of course it can: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/web-server/

and so on and so forth

2. It is connected to my TV so I quite often use it as my "multimedia PC" as well, watching movies etc. with it. I have a Google Chromecast as well for that, but a Raspberry Pi is more versatile for that, like e.g. watching videos offline.

It is quite interesting how I can do pretty much everything on it I would do on my x86 PCs, including my work... EXCEPT playing modern PC games. It has some games of its own and runs quite many emulators too.

I guess I could live without it too, but I had been looking for such low power "PC" for a long time already, even considering if some kind of low power Android tablet could do those tasks. Anyway, RPi4 fits my needs perfectly.

You can play games like Celeste and Shovel knight (and probably Into the Breach) that are not that old :D
check out Box86

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/hf3yz4/fna_games_steam_and_box86_games/

Wow, I didn't know x86 emulation is that far already on ARM.

Be a rebel and compile your slow interpreted code ;). I expect you'll see a noticeable speedup in non-IO bound tasks. And it's very straightforward to use, unlike Cython and the like.

It's crazy...
I've read/seen somewhere there are some successful tries running some Windows games under Box86 and Wine.

I need another pi!!!

It's neat and convenient, suited for people who wants an integrated PC without the clutter of a case and cables running everywhere, I see it particularly fit in the education sector but wouldn't make sense an integrated touchpad?

On the other side you trade off the incredibly versatility of the PI: that keyboard is huge compared to mini cases available for few dollars and at the same time the benefits of a headless remote machine are nullified.

So great just for some specific use cases and pointless for everything else.

Yeah, and a screen. We could call it a laptop.