Holy smokes, they actually fixed my personal pet peeve of this entire product line: it has an internal M.2 slot. The performance of pretty much any SD card for a desktop workload is poor to say the least, and letting a USB boot device dangle out kind of defeats the purpose of the form factor. But this new model has actual fast internal storage!
P.S. HN mods, consider fixing the submission name. It’s 500+, not 500, and that completely changes the meaning of the article.
> Holy smokes, they actually fixed my personal pet peeve of this entire product line: it has an internal M.2 slot.
What's odd is that the original 500 already had an unpopulated M.2 slot, so they considered it a year ago but backed out for whatever reason.
According to Jeff Geerling's video, the main PCB in the 500+ is identical to the 500, same revision and all. Presumably they planned both the 500 and 500+ at the same time so they designed a single PCB that could accommodate both, and then only populated the m.2 parts when building a 500+.
So I don't think they "backed out" rather just didn't have the 500+ ready to launch yet.
Note that the mechanical keyboard is probably one of the major reasons the Pi 500+ took a lot longer to release than the regular 500.
According to an interview on the Pi blog[1], it was "years", with prototypes being built through 2023.
I know the design lifecycle for a product like this is in the 3-5 year range, and adding on a custom mechanical keyboard in a mass-market product like this is a tall order.
Honestly I'm not put off by the $200 price tag. If you use one in person (like at a Micro Center here in the US), you'll feel it's a decent midrange mechanical keyboard. It won't compete on the high end (IMO $200+), but to strap that onto a decent low-end PC in a fanless design isn't cheap, even at the scales Raspberry Pi operates.
They have some margin, for sure, but that's also how they turn profit, which is especially useful since then went public.
At least they're still putting out products like this, that don't really have any industrial/commercial appeal, compared to specialized compute modules for individual customers[2].
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/meet-the-engineers-behind-r...
[2] https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/09/23/raspberry-pi-cm0-cas...
>It won't compete on the high end (IMO $200+)
Even low-midend mech keyboard like attackshark x75 will be better
I don't think they backed out. It seems clear that they always have intended to offer these exact configurations, since they are using the same board.
Even the connection to the new keyboard was already present on the 500 even though it used another connector than the 500+