Using the Raspberry Pi 400 With Your Mac and iCloud

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at using the Raspberry Pi 400 computer with your Apple devices.

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So this is the Raspberry Pi 400 computer. It looks just like a keyboard and it's that size. It weighs about the same. But inside it has a full raspberry pi computer and in the back it has a variety of different ports including this big port here that people use to connect electronic devices and all sorts of hobby kits to. But the rest of it is stuff that you should recognize. Some HDMI ports. Some USB ports. A power port and an Ethernet port. So this is a relatively slow computer. So what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that it's a $100. So it's cheap to get and with the HDMI output it's easy to hook this up to a television. It also comes with a mouse and all the cables that you need to use it. So it's all there together in a box. You don't have to buy anything else to actually hook this up to a TV and start computing.

This is what the operating system looks like. It's a Linux like operating system that works in a familiar way. You point and click. You've got a desktop. You've got applications that you run. Things like that. There are a whole bunch of applications that come pre-installed including a web browser, an email client, and a lot of tools for learning programming and other basic computer skills. It also comes with a complete set of LibreOffice apps. So you've got your word processor, spreadsheet, etc. Now with HDMI out you could hook this up to a TV or you could hook it up to a computer screen that has HDMI input. Then the idea is if you just want to use it to browse the web you certainly can do that. You can browse the web, go to most websites, and they should work. It comes with a standard browser, the Chromium browser, which should work for most cases. But it's not going to have the features that you're used to seeing in say Safari, Chrome, Microsoft, Firefox. But it works just fine. The thing to keep in mind all the time is this is a hundred dollar computer. So don't expect the same performance and features you're going to get in a thousand dollar computer. 

Now the reason I got this and the question I want to answer is how will this work if you have Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Let's say you're completely connected using Apple's iCloud system. Can you use a Raspberry Pi with that? Well, my first thought was to use iCloud.com so that you can access all of your iCloud information on the Raspberry Pi. Well this didn't work too well. At least not with the chromium browser. I kept getting browser time-outs. It seemed it was just too slow and the processing and the scripting on the webpages just took too long for it to actually work. So I had an idea that maybe I should get another browser. There are a variety of different browsers that you can install and I installed Firefox since it was the one out of all the different browsers that I'm familiar with. Once I installed Firefox I found that Firefox was much faster and I was able to access all the pages at iCloud.com just fine. Now it didn't quite work as fast as I would like. It definitely was a lot slower than doing it on a Mac or PC. But I was able to go to various different apps. 

For instance here I'm using the Mail app inside of iCloud.com so I can access my mail this way. You could also use the built-in Mail client to just access your mail directly as you would, say, on a Windows or Linux machine. I was able to use other apps as well. For instance the Calendar app. That loaded up fine and I was able to access and do everything I would normally do using the iCloud.com website's Calendar app. I was also able to go and use Notes as well. That worked fine. A big test was using the Files app. I can access all my iCloud Drive files just fine. Now, of course, I don't necessarily have the apps to be able to use them but if it's something like text file then I could read the text file. If it's something like an image then I could view the image. I could also download the image if I wanted to. If it's something like a Pages document I could access it because there is a Pages web app built into iCloud.com. So that's what loads up when I go to view a Pages document. As you can see I'm working in the web version of Pages just fine. It's definitely slow, so you don't get that kind responsiveness you're used to when using the Pages app on a Mac. Even an old Mac is going to beat this experience hands down. But you can access it and use it. Then you have Numbers and Keynote as well. Then you have a variety of other apps and things you can access at the iCloud.com website.

Now keep in mind here I'm editing out all of the delays that I'm seeing. So like when I went to open a Pages document it took like a full ten seconds for that Pages document to open. So things seemed to be happening really fast here in my video. But actually I needed to have a lot of patience to use these web apps on the Raspberry Pi 400. 

One thing that I really wanted to access was my iCloud Photos Library. I can use the iCloud.com app for that as well. So I have access to all of my photos. I can view anyone I want and it was easy to look at my photos, browse through them, look at my albums. Even do kind of a slide show by using the arrow keys to go forward through the photos.  Of course you can't edit the photos and do other things that you would normally do in the Photos app. But at least I had access to my photos. So if this was hooked up to a TV say in a den or the living room then it's another way for you to access all of your photos from your iCloud Photos Library.

Another thing I tried out was Apple Music because I thought, well you could hook this up to a TV and then access the web version of Apple Music if you're a subscriber. Then be able to play all of your music. That seemed to work fine as well in Firefox although I wasn't able to test the sound. I can never get the sound output to work here probably because I'm just using HDMI. I wasn't actually using a TV. I was bringing these to my input into my Mac for this recording. I'm sure that it probably works if you play around with it. But the interesting thing is that there is no audio outport on the Raspberry Pi. So you can't just hook that up to some speakers and expect it to play some music. It has to go out through HDMI or perhaps there's another peripheral you can get to give you an audio out.

Now another thing you can do is you can use Screen Sharing to be able to see your Mac screen on the Raspberry Pi. A VNC screen viewer comes built into the operating system. So it's already there. Just run VNC and then you can access your Mac by just using the local IP address for that Mac. You login using your user account ID and password and now you can see your Mac's screen in a window on the Raspberry Pi. Working this way is always going to be slower whether you're doing it on a Raspberry Pi or another Mac but if does give you full access to just about everything you do on your Mac. You really don't have access to things that have sound but you can launch any app. You're just basically controlling your Mac and the Raspberry Pi and seeing the results in a window. So if the idea is to give yourself access to your iMac that's upstairs while you're downstairs the Raspberry Pi can do that as long as you don't expect a great deal of speed and efficiency.

Let me end by saying, of course, this machine was not designed to do what I'm doing. It's not designed as a companion to your Apple devices. I'm just testing it out to see if it could be used as one. It looks like that answer is yes in general because you could do screen sharing and you can access iCloud.com as long as you add a different web browser. But the real use for this is as a computer by itself. Just using the built-in web browser to go to webpages and giving yourself another computer in the house that doesn't cost that much and also has some really cool features in terms of learning how computers work, learning programming and things like that. So if you enjoy computing as a hobby, not just a tool for you to use to get things done, then you may want to look at the Raspberry Pi 400 as a fun gift to get for yourself as something to play around with. Then as a bonus you can access a lot of your iCloud things and screen share with your Macs as well.