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The Raspberry Pi has been pop with hobbyists and enthusiasts ever since the beginning iteration was introduced in 2022. Back and then, the CPU was an ARM11 single-cadre chip running at 700MHz. Today, the Raspberry Pi three 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 nevertheless pretty lightweight compared to modern phones, we've seen some efforts to build a Raspberry Pi hardware platform. A new laptop variant from pi-peak 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-superlative educational foundation and it runs its own Linux-based Raspberry Pi OS, Polaris. The company has created a feasible set up of basic desktop applications, including LibreOffice, aslope a modular rail system that allows other components, like the pi-top speaker or the new pi-tiptop PULSE (all capitalization on these products is original, delight don't send me capitalization Nazi emails). The visitor'southward FAQ states that game programming and development are handled in its CEED surroundings, writing:

Using pi-topOS which is arranged with our educational game CEED universe the gamer will larn how to code and create hardware every bit 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 beingness compatible with all Raspberry Pi software currently on the market and ships with Chrome pre-installed via the Polaris Bone. The sliding keyboard is a major draw for the platform, with a modular organization that allows other components to be integrated within the chassis.

SlidingRails

The idea of being able to slide the keyboard back and forth is a cool way to permit access to system components. Information technology'd be interesting to see what kind of OEM systems we'd see if mainstream manufacturers offered an analogous organisation. The $319 price on the laptop means that this isn't, strictly speaking, a great bargain, and you tin can buy improve hardware in a Chromebook or low-terminate Windows laptop.

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