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“Everyone is so passionless about technology,” said Nothing cofounder Carl Pei when WIRED spoke to him about his upstart brand, known for its striking clear plastic designs, two years ago. “On hardware, it’s basically more and more of the same. Less and less differentiation, and consumers aren’t as excited anymore. People don’t want to watch launch events.”
The brand still claims to be hellbent on reshaping the look, feel, and product structure of the consumer tech. Cofounder Akis Evangelidis echoed Pei’s vintage sentiment nearly verbatim when I spoke to him about Nothing’s new headphones in late March.
Here’s the rub: To date, Nothing has released nothing but earbuds and cell phones—none of which have changed the market dramatically.
Today, as the brand announces its third generation of earbuds—a renamed, revoiced pair of noise-canceling buds called the Nothing Ear and a more affordable pair called the Nothing Ear (a), themselves mere iterations of the prior Nothing Ear (stick) and Nothing Ear (2)—we have to ask: Will Nothing ever be something other than a brand that sells affordable mid-tier products with good design?
How long will these good-looking, passable products be needed to fund the real innovation we were all promised when Pei stated to WIRED three years ago that his company would be “so much more” than a brand that just made headphones and mobile devices?
Are New Earbuds the Answer?
People really like AirPods. They’ve been the best-selling earbuds on Earth since the year they came out, and will likely continue said dominance until Apple decides to rebrand them.
At least in audio, Nothing has done much of what the rest of the earbud world has. It has taken the trunked headphone look and done something it feels is special with it.
For the initial Nothing Ear 1 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), its designers essentially made them clear, put the buds in a nice-looking (albeit relatively large) charging case, and sold them for a more affordable price. It’s a goal-line play out of virtually every electronics manufacturer’s playbook in the past 10 years, and it worked well for the brand as far as funding future products and hiring.
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From having no products, the Cayman Islands-registered company was able to assemble a device with off-the-shelf components (the first-generation Ear 1 didn’t even have custom drivers) quickly and sell it, drawing on connections the cofounders had made while at OnePlus, another brand with a similar strategy.
Nothing's initial product had a good marriage of hardware and software, and the headphones sounded pretty solid compared to others. We liked them on review, though not enough that they’re a top pick for us.
The second generation of earbuds, the Ear (Stick) (7/10, WIRED Review) and Ear (2) (8/10, WIRED Review), brought custom drivers and a better case, although they still look, feel, and sound very similar to the vast majority of earbuds that I call “AirPods but.” You probably get the idea: AirPods but with color. AirPods but with better eartips. AirPods but with LDAC lossless audio or noise canceling. Nearly every brand has them; nearly all of them are pretty decent. LG doesn’t even make cell phones anymore and yet it has a pair of AirPod clones. The fruit hangs to the ground.
The new Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a) appear to once again offer incremental performance increases. I say appear to because, though the company asked WIRED to announce these new products to the world, it has yet to provide us with usable images, battery life, a release date, or pricing, despite repeated inquiries. All the brand would supply was the picture you see at the top of this article.
Nothing did provide us with a bit of info about the inside of the headphones, which we have to assume will resemble the older models until proven otherwise. The brand claims a new ceramic driver will make crisper, clearer sound up high, and a new internal architecture will offer deeper bass. It also touts new adaptive noise-canceling tech in the Nothing Ear as being now 5 dB quieter overall (from 40 dB to 45 dB of reduction between generations). That’s fine, but it’s not staggering.
I’m not sure whether these incremental innovations are enough to put the brand on the top tier of consumer audio, but at least they keep it from falling behind. Apple itself has incrementally updated the AirPods and AirPods Pro for generations—but it also has the world’s best-selling product.
No Solid State for Nothing
It’s not like Nothing doesn’t have the capacity to develop new things. When it released its first headphones, it had a combined staff of 30 on audio. That staff is now up to 300, according to Evangelidis, including five dedicated acoustic engineers and a team of 30 folks alone to debug the new active noise canceling. That’s significantly more brainpower, which is exactly the kind of stuff that might lead to noticable innovation either in these new models or down the line.
Once again: I haven't yet heard or seen a pair, and I have no idea what they'll cost. They are set to release later this year, with samples coming to reviewers in short order. On paper, and without the vital information of pricing (but knowing that historically Nothing's buds have cost $100 to $150), they seem like they’ll be competitive buds that will likely offer many of the same features as options from JLab, Jabra, OnePlus, Samsung, and countless others.
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It’s worth noting that while others might not be using ceramic (an uncommon material in headphone drivers), many competitors also use custom drivers of one claimed miracle material or another. So while Nothing might indeed have something special, it's by no means guaranteed.
Musically, I have a hard time believing the 12-mm dynamic drivers and increased airflow in either pair of Nothing's new buds will compete with the xMEMS solid state drivers inside the $150 Creative earbuds I just tested, which also look like AirPods and might be the best wireless earbuds I’ve ever heard.
Until I’ve heard them side-by-side, I have to assume the Nothing drivers could, but solid state drivers are a fundamentally better technology in my opinion, and one that Nothing could readily license.
Come On, Carl
None of this is the kind of thing I’d clamor to watch a keynote about. The minutiae of better headphone drivers and a bit more silence is what everyone else is also selling.
That’s the difficulty in trying to dramatically impact a well-funded, well-marketed field like mobile with little more than marketing hype: Nothing is announcing its third-gen earbuds months after Apple has released an entire new genre of mobile device in the Vision Pro. In terms of innovation, it’s clear who is really trying to be “so much more.”
Can Nothing develop enough beyond clear plastic designs and a few in-house components and ever compete at the true cutting edge? I think it could, if it raises enough cash to make those investments. It's fair to say brands such as Samsung, Google, Apple, and others have significantly more than 300 employees in their audio departments, and budgets to match.
For now, I am excited to try any pairs of new earbuds with a dedicated design team, these new Nothing buds included, even if the progression is iterative. I’m a headphone reviewer, and I like competition and dreamers, even if Pei’s promises at Nothing still haven’t been delivered. I appreciate that Nothing continues to chase Apple-tier performance at reduced cost, just like I admire other brands that do the same thing.
The same, honestly, could be said about how we feel about Nothing in the smartphone space. We enjoy the clean user interface and design language of the Nothing Phone (2a) (9/10, WIRED Recommends) put on top of stock Android OS, and we appreciate that it is one of the best Android phones you can buy at the $350 price point.
If Nothing remains focused on making affordable products with quality designs and customized versions of proven technology, it could continue to grow, and grow large.
But I also think, at least for now, that we need to stop talking about Nothing as some game-changing tech company. It's a really good mid-tier competitor. That’s a fine enough place to be.
Updated 4/5/24: The initial piece listed the new Nothing Ear (a) as the more expensive model than the Nothing Ear. This piece has been updated to reflect the fact that the new Nothing Ear is the higher-end model.
