This Raspberry Pi Laptop Lets You Peek Inside to See the Components

The Raspberry Pi has been popular with hobbyists and enthusiasts ever since the first iteration was introduced in 2012. Back then, the CPU was an ARM11 single-core chip running at 700MHz. Today, the Raspberry Pi 3 offers a quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU running at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, and a higher-clocked variant of the original GPU.

While that’s still pretty lightweight compared to modern phones, we’ve seen some efforts to build a Raspberry Pi hardware platform. A new laptop variant from pi-top offers a lime-green chassis, a sliding keyboard with direct access to the underlying components, four USB ports, and a 14-inch, 1080p display.

The new pi-top system is the second laptop from the pi-top educational foundation and it runs its own Linux-based Raspberry Pi OS, Polaris. The company has created a viable set of basic desktop applications, including LibreOffice, alongside a modular rail system that allows other components, like the pi-top speaker or the new pi-top PULSE (all capitalization on these products is original, please don’t send me capitalization Nazi emails). The company’s FAQ states that game programming and development are handled in its CEED environment, writing:

Using pi-topOS which is bundled with our educational game CEED universe the gamer will learn how to code and create hardware as they progress through the game with the opportunity of enhancing their gaming experience with the use of DIY add-on boards that the user will be instructed on how to build, create and play with.

Pi-top is also listed as being compatible with all Raspberry Pi software currently on the market and ships with Chrome pre-installed via the Polaris OS. The sliding keyboard is a major draw for the platform, with a modular system that allows other components to be integrated within the chassis.

The idea of being able to slide the keyboard back and forth is a cool way to allow access to system components. It’d be interesting to see what kind of OEM systems we’d see if mainstream manufacturers offered an analogous system. The $319 price on the laptop means that this isn’t, strictly speaking, a great deal, and you can buy better hardware in a Chromebook or low-end Windows laptop.

But the argument in favor of an RBP system is that it’s meant to offer a specific introduction to programming and computers that other products don’t match. We can’t comment much on how the system compares on that level, given the lack of comparative options, but the fact that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is still rolling out new models and hardware variants five years after the first products came to market suggests there’s an enduring desire for more powerful variants of the same premise. The OLPC project may have faded, but there’s clearly still some interest in relatively low-cost hardware aimed at introducing kids to computing basics that doesn’t depend on Microsoft Windows.