Nothing, the consumer technology company founded by Carl Pei, has revealed what is likely to be their first ever product, truly wireless earbuds. In a company blog post, Carl Pei details the principles that shaped the design of the earbuds and the design of upcoming products.
The product is called the Concept 1, and it is part of their mid-term vision of releasing products in existing categories that follow certain design principles. These principles are as follows:
- Weightless – We distill technology to the essentials, embracing raw tech, where every gram and every byte live with purpose. We peel off everything superficial, like unnecessary branding on the surface, to focus solely on what adds true value to the user experience. We spend as much time thinking about what we can remove from a product, as what we can add to it.
- Effortless – We strive to make things simpler for the user. We want every product interaction, from picking it up to turning it on, to be intuitive, obvious, and natural. When designing and engineering our products, we believe form must follow function. During product development, we work on countless millimeter and pixel iterations. All those iterations add up to simplify the user experience, until everything feels effortless.
- Timeless – The designs that are the most appealing to us are ones that consist of shapes that look natural and warm, yet don’t easily feel outdated. We’ve all had that moment where we’ve interacted with an object and felt that sense of wonder or surprise. That’s a really important part of being human and something we’re always trying to balance. Concept 1 takes inspiration from a grandmother’s tobacco pipe. We try to ground our objects in something familiar, which we hope will allow them to feel fresh for many years.
Nothing recently partnered with the Swedish company teenage engineering to help with product design. The company also acquired the intellectual property of the smartphone brand known as Essential, which was a company that was earlier founded by Andy Rubin.