Carl Pei, OnePlus’ co-founder, who parted ways with the company at the end of 2020 had said he would announce the name of his new company on January 27. The Swedish entrepreneur also created hype for the upcoming company by giving away a few Apple MacBook Air laptops Well, today that day finally arrived and the general tech community was buzzing with excitement in regards to this venture. When the time came, we saw a tweet by Carl stating that he might announce nothing. Lo and behold, he actually did Nothing all this time. Confused? So were we. In reality, the company that the ex-OnePlus co-founder has formed has been dubbed Nothing. Weird? Yes. Unique? Even more.
“Nothing’s mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future,” says Pei, Nothing’s founder and CEO, in a press release. “We believe that the best technology is beautiful, yet natural and intuitive to use. When sufficiently advanced, it should fade into the background and feel like nothing,” he further added.
When is the First Product Launching?
In the same release, we saw the company stating the first tech products from them would launch later in 2021. That is all available, we’re afraid, it seems Carl liked the OnePlus Nord hype train and thought of doing something similar, adding to the suspense and keeping the tech fraternity chattering about Nothing.
If you, like us are wondering about the company's identity, it describes itself as a “London based consumer technology company” with some notable investors, including iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and YouTuber Casey Neistat. Cred founder Kunal Shah also invested in this venture, he announced a few days ago.
“Right now... the team is being built, so we want to focus on simpler categories,” Pei says, “but as our team gains capabilities and skills we want to start moving up. The ultimate vision of having everything connected in a seamless way, that can only happen when you have multiple categories of products that are connected.”
What Is It About?
Well, the company is not announcing what it is all about. If you remember, last year, Wired had reported that the new company could focus on music and might even make its own headphones.
When asked, Pei declined to confirm whether headphones would be among Nothing’s early products. When asked by Wired, he said the company’s plans were “so much more than that.”
While there’s been speculation that Nothing might be in the process of developing an accompanying music service, Pei told The Verge in an interview that Nothing plans to make most of its money by selling hardware rather than software subscriptions, at least initially.
“We haven’t spent too much time thinking about the software portion of it,” Pei says. “It definitely needs to be a good user experience if you are to generate revenue from software.”
In the long term, however, he admits that a “healthy business” requires both good hardware and good software.
Should OnePlus Be Worried?
No, at least not as of now. OnePlus does have a portfolio consisting of audio products, but they are limited to earphones and neckbands. Nothing might enter the audio market in any manner possible, be it with audiophile headphones or even speakers, but, for now, we can only say time will tell.
The backing of Carl is definitely a plus for this company, but there is much more to success than a pretty name and a famous founder. The products on offer have to be good and competitive and, not have issues that are usually present on inexperienced brands’ products, such as quality issues or a lack of, for lack of a better word, Panache.
We do hope that Carl succeeds and the Nothing company achieves success. As for its products, we are on the lookout for what the company might offer and if we get to know about anything that surfaces, be sure that we will be ready to share that with you.
We share the same excitement as the general public when it comes to a new company, especially when it comes from a company that has a lot of creative individuals having their hands deep in the mix.
