[BurritoBeans]

Welcome to another long thread about something silly, in this case the Pi-Top enclosure for the Raspberry Pi.

In this thread I'm going to describe my experience over the course of a month using the Pi-Top as a replacement-of-sorts for my daily driver laptop, a Thinkpad T43p (Yeah my laptop is a bit outdated, get over it), and how I feel about the enclosure in general.

Note: I will not be describing the computer in all that much detail as I figure by now the Raspberry Pi is a big enough device that most people on here would have at least a general understanding of it. If you don't know please use google as even from the first one I bought in 2011 there's never been a shortage of information on the device itself.


Part 1: What do you get and for how much money
The Pi-Top cost me $300 which definitely is a bit of money - it's pretty obvious to me when I got it and now owning it that you can get something more powerful for the same price, but that's not the point of this thread.



The box includes:

• The Pi-Top enclosure itself
  
• An (optional) Raspberry Pi 3B+
  
• A charger
  
• The "inventors kit" with simple electrical components and a breadboard expansion
  
• Manuals
  
• A SD card with PiTop OS pre-installed
  

The two 128GB MicroSD cards are ones I bought so yeah don't expect to get those.

So would I say that this is worth the $300 and shipping it cost? Well, being that the SD card is fairly small (8GB) and that adding on something like a speaker would've cost me extra, I'm not too sure about that being the case.


Part 2: Setting it up
Alright, so I'm not going to detail the whole install process of the Pi itself as that's what the manual and/or their site is for. What I will say is that while I like the magnetic rails I'm not that large of a fan of the mounting system for everything else - the points to screw the RPi in were a bit off making me have to use awkward angles and the cooling/power bridge, while working great on a standard RPI3, kept having issues fitting properly on the 3B+. The case wasn't very comforting when it comes to looks as everything being a bright plastic which feels a little cheap and having all these gaps got to be a bit concerning on if it would hold up.




The operating system is a modified version of Raspbian with their own "dashboard" which operates something similar to a phone or Windows 8 and the plain desktop hiding in the background. I kept getting notifications to update when I first got the system and when I'd hit "update" the system would hang and crash after about ten minutes - eventually I learned that the OS they shipped was an outdated version and I had to download a completely new version, I instead opted to update via the terminal and while it worked even that had issues which needed more work to get ironed out - my battery monitor broke and the dashboard flickers on boot alongside some other minor things. A quick note, while writing this I noticed that the dashboard completely crapped out and won't open so yeah, that's real nice and I think I'm just going to do a fresh install of the OS.



The keyboard, well I've got some issues with this. It feels almost like one of those knockoff Apple keyboards with the cheap flat square keys and the enlarged enter key screwed me up a bit from the normal typing feel. Still, it does work and after some time I got somewhat used to it.

The screen isn't the greatest of course, I mean it's a (fairly) cheap device so I wouldn't expect a ton, but it does work. The brightness levels give a nice range depending on where you are and the colors get a bit washed-out at different viewing angles than dead on and maybe 15 degrees off but again, I wouldn't expect much more so I don't mind that much.

So, my initial impression after getting it up to date and set up is that this thing is a bit of a mess - the case works but flexes quite strangely, the mounting system isn't all too great, and the OS required me to go through and mess with packages - something that I doubt the target audience (people with little exposure to Linux, etc.) would be all that confident in doing sometimes even with a guide online. Still, it does work so it's time to take it around with me.


Part 3: Use
Alright, onto the fun part - can this replace my 2005 Thinkpad for my daily tasks which aren't too demanding processing-wise or am I going to jump right back to my Pentium M and 2GB of RAM?

The first week with this was on my one week of vacation from work which meant that while it wouldn't get much use it would be tested a bit. I'm happy to say that while the case didn't seem the greatest with all the flexing it held up perfectly to being slid over tables, thrown into my backpack, and dropped off a desk by accident a few times. When it came to getting on the crappy hotel wifi there was little to no issue apart from Chromium, the default installed browser, being a bit slow to hit their access pages. I did a bit of downloading files here and there which was smooth and used the device for youtube which also went fairly smoothly. The issue came up with work though, as even going through spreadsheets in Google Sheets was slower than my Thinkpad was, even when it only had the stock 512MB of RAM.  Still, it did what I needed to and I can't be mad about that.

After a while of ignoring the dashboard because I set it to boot into the CLI instead of the desktop I noticed that they packed in some new software. There's a piece of software for coding in Python which is clearly designed at a younger audience or someone with little-to-no experience in programming that interfaces with the stuff from the "inventors kit" which gave you little projects to do - this was neat for a start at programming, I can remember doing similar things in C with Arduinos when I was ten or eleven at the hackerspace, but I wouldn't say it's that amazing. There's also a game, CEEDUniverse, which had you just running around - it's clearly some sort of edutainment software being that it tries to teach you about elements and other stuff and while I thought it was neat for a bit it couldn't hold my attention all that well.



One thing that gets a bit annoying carrying this thing is that the almost safety green color screams "Look at me, I have a big bright thing" and draws attention - while I love that it's nearly impossible to lose unless someone takes it due to the color, I had people asking me roughly every fifteen minutes about it when I was trying to get work done and that became a bit of an issue.



Now, use at home. The first test I felt like throwing it into was gaming as I figured why not? A quick install of RetroPie and an overclock later and I had the thing running Dreamcast games - while I wouldn't say I'd trust it on Dreamcast games as the device got a bit hot, everything ran quite smooth with no noticeable changes from my 3B I keep as a media player/emulation box by my desk. One issue does come up in that two of the USB ports are blocked off so I was only able to hook in two controllers without a hub - the third and fourth USB ports are redirected in the case with one being able to be accessed off the I/O bridge for USB drives, etc. and the other going to I have no clue where.



At the place where I work, now that I have Ethernet, let's try this again. The browser was, like expected, a bit slow but I'm happy to say that with the more stable connection I had a lot less time wasted waiting for information to get put into its place. Still, on my desk, let's just say that I was really missing my Thinkpad. The lack of USB ports and native serial ports meant that I couldn't interface a lot of my equipment without having to put on a USB hub and USB to Serial adapter alongside trying to get pretty poorly optimized software to work so that my hardware could do what it needs to. In my use case it was a flop and I pulled out the old desktop I keep around for when the laptop dies.

So, would I say that it works? For light tasks and messing around by all means yes - it can handle Google services and LibreOffice for productivity, I was able to get some stuff to run with a bit of effort, and it can be worked with fairly easily as it's just Raspbian at the end of the day.


Part 4: Conclusion
While the Pi-Top works and does exactly what it's said to do, I don't think I'd recommend anyone to pay the $300+ it costs for one of these unless you know you want a pre-built RPi enclosure that acts as a laptop and are willing to just slap your own OS on to not care about the extra keyboard keys or work with what they give you.

Pros:

• The battery life is nice, getting around six to eight hours of use with little issue
  
• The screen while clearly not too great works for what you need it to
  
• The OS they ship (when it works) is a pretty alright version of Raspbian
  
• The extra software they pack in isn't all too bad depending on who you get it for
  
• The cooling bridge does its job pretty well and compared to a bare RPi3B it helped when doing things like playing games
  
• The internal USB port is nice for things like USB drives or the M.2 enclosure I tested as it keeps them from just dangling out the back
  

Cons:

• The operating system is a hot mess by default and required more work than I think the target audience is comfortable with
  
• The enclosure I felt was a bit flimsy and all the flex in the plastic and gaps between parts wasn't very helpful
  
• The limited I/O was a bit restricting at times making me have to carry even more
  
• The keyboard, while it works, is a bit sponge-y and I'm not a fan of the enlarged enter key
  
• It couldn't come that close to (for what I do) competing against an old Thinkpad
  

Now, I do realize that my use case isn't the standard needing support for legacy stuff and I do think that if you wanted something to just pump out some code on now and then or a portable Pi it would work. I feel that there are much cheaper alternatives like buying an old Thinkpad and just loading Linux on it but I mean hey, if you want something newer I can't blame you.. For maybe children or someone with basic needs like the google productivity software this could work nicely, but it's just not for me. I will be keeping it as it makes a nice little portable game device and box to tinker with now and then, but the T43p and other outdated IBM/Lenovo stuff is here to stay until I finally break down and buy a modern laptop.

So yeah, that's the Pi-Top, a somewhat flawed but still fun little RPi enclosure that just costs a bit more than I think it's worth at the moment. If you have any questions or want more details on anything feel free to ask, and as always thanks for reading.