Getting the hang of through-hole soldering is tricky for those of us tinkering at home with our irons, spools, flux, and, sometimes, braids. It's almost reassuring, then, to learn that through-hole soldering was also a pain for a firm that has made more than 60 million products with it.

Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely.

The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

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The Raspberry Pi foundation has spent the last year filling out the Pi 5 lineup—in August, we got a cheaper $50 version with 2GB of RAM, and in December, we got the Pi 500, a Pi-inside-a-keyboard intended specifically for general-purpose desktop use. Today, the Pi 5 board achieves what may be its final form: a version with 16GB of RAM, available for $120.

The 16GB version of the Pi 5 includes the revised "d0" stepping of the Pi 5's BCM2712 processor. For the Pi's purposes, this chip is functionally identical to the original version but uses slightly less power and runs slightly cooler because it cuts out silicon used for features that the Pi 5 didn't take advantage of.

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton writes that the 16GB version of the Pi 5 is possible because of other tweaks made to the d0 stepping of the Pi 5's processor, plus an updated LPDDR4X chip from Micron that could fit eight 16 Gbit RAM dies inside a single package that could fit on the Pi 5's board.

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One of the selling points of the Raspberry Pi 5 (released in October 2023) is that it was fast enough and had enough memory to be a credible general-purpose desktop PC, if not an especially fast one. For Pi-as-desktop enthusiasts, the company has a couple of new pre-holiday announcements. The biggest is the Raspberry Pi 500, which fits the components of an 8GB Pi 5 into a small keyboard-shaped case for $90.

It's a follow-up to the original Raspberry Pi 400, and like that system, it takes the components from the regular Pi 5 board and puts them on a different PCB with all of the ports positioned in a single row across the back of the device. It includes one USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports, a microSD slot, two micro HDMI ports, the 40-pin GPIO header, and a gigabit Ethernet port.

In addition to the standalone $90 system, the Pi 500 will also be sold as part of a Desktop Kit with a mouse, power supply, HDMI cable, and printed Beginner's Guide booklet for $120.

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