The Nothing Anomaly — Why Does It Exist?
The tech industry is pretty much saturated at this stage — there are companies at the top with Apple & Samsung running neck to neck in the international market, and then there are the Chinese brands selling cheap phones in large quantities to cater to the needs of developing countries. It has gotten to the point where tech giants like LG have had to kill their smartphone industry entirely. The threatening cutthroat competition has gotten so tight that every product launch and event that a smartphone company makes these days is precisely calculated. Amidst such a world comes a company that is literally called Nothing and takes the world by storm.
So…. what worked?
The OnePlus Journey
To understand the philosophy behind the creation of Nothing, it is important to understand the story of OnePlus as a brand as well as its co-founder, Carl Pei.
For people who may not know, Carl Pei was the founder & CEO of OnePlus. Ever since he started his career, he has been in the smartphone industry. He joined Nokia in 2010 after dropping out of business school, and after working there for just three months, he jumped ship to work for Meizu, which is a little less known smartphone company based in China. Shortly after that, he joined Oppo as an International Marketing Manager, where he worked directly under Pete Lau. Pete and Carl founded OnePlus, a smartphone company that broke off from Oppo to create high-end flagship smartphones, starting with the OnePlus One which ran on CyanogenMod.
For a lot of Gen Z people, that might even sound made up, but it was basically a custom ROM that eliminated the bloatware. In fact, in the initial stages of smartphone development, CyanogenMod was arguably one of the only ways to get the ‘pure Android experience’ before Google hit the market with Nexus and its own smartphone line. The OnePlus One and Micromax Yureka are probably very familiar to Gen Y & even Gen Z, especially among Indians, and for good reason — the UI was clean and it sold millions of units.
Another thing that made OnePlus seem more exclusive was that it allowed purchases based on an invite-only basis. This generated a lot of buzz around the company and distinguished itself with a brand of uniqueness — what people in branding call ‘The Magician’ archetype. This allowed the company to employ the most powerful marketing strategy known to humankind — word-of-mouth.
However, after this, things turned a little sour between Cyanogen and OnePlus, eventually leading the latter to drop Cyanogen and create their own custom UI which they named OxygenOS. The introduction of OxygenOS in the OnePlus Two was a game changer in the smartphone industry because the company realised how important software was to smartphones. This led to tech enthusiasts and the general public paying more attention to the brand itself. Coupling that with the exclusivity proposition, the next phone, the OnePlus 3, became one of the fastest-selling phones of the company.
By this point, the brand strategy of OnePlus had earned itself the title of ‘Flagship Killer’ — a well-built well-rounded smartphone that could perform almost at par with premium smartphones while keeping the price at almost half of the latter. Understanding the market by this point, Carl Pei had pushed OnePlus’s market into Southeast Asian countries where the middle class was in the majority, and soon more than a quarter of urban Indians were using OnePlus devices.
However, that wasn’t when things took a turn for the worse — that happened right after the OnePlus 7 Pro — beginning with the naming scheme. Unlike the conventional naming system of pro, max, and ultra, OnePlus went with T to denote their more premium smartphone. The 3 was followed by the 3T, the 5 was followed by the 5T, and the 6 was followed by the 6T. However, with the 7, it was named the 7 Pro, and that, I believe, partially had to do with the association of the word Pro with ‘better’ in Mac & iPad devices. This is where I think Carl must have understood that having Oppo Electronics breathing down his back wouldn’t be the best idea.
Furthermore, with the 7 series, the image of OnePlus as a Flagship killer was directly affected, because, with the change in the naming scheme, the intention became clear — they wanted to sell flagship phones. That, in itself, is not a bad intention, but there are certain things you need to provide to users when you are selling premium phones — the basic one being water resistance. Now, even though they advertised the phone with a video of them dropping it in a bucket of water, there is no official water rating on the OnePlus 7 Pro. Another thing that was missing was wireless charging. Back in 2019, wireless charging was very basic and slow, but its absence meant that, spec-wise, OnePlus was behind. “The price was comparable, so why not the specs?” That seems like a reasonable thing to ask for.
However, with the increase of the prices in the 7 series, they had to cater to their usual market — the middle class, and that’s when the Nord came out. However, by then, the chinks in the armor were starting to show. The build quality progressively kept getting worse, to the point where things started falling apart. Literally. We all saw what happened with Jerryrigeverything’s OnePlus 10 Pro durability test, and if you haven’t, here it is:
However, Carl had had enough. After the launch of OnePlus Nord in August, Carl Pei put down his resignation and stepped down as co-founder and CEO of OnePlus — and this is when Nothing comes into the picture. However, before we talk about Nothing, we need to take a closer look at why Carl Pei left OnePlus, and the environment in which Nothing was conceived.
Why Did Carl Pei Leave OnePlus?
The reason why Carl Pei left OnePlus is mostly unclear, as his official reason was that he wanted to go off on a tangent and start his own company Nothing. However, it can be speculated that the reasons mentioned above could have all been factors that led to this. To recap,
- The overbearing invasive nature of Oppo
- The change in branding strategy
- Steadily declining build quality of products
I feel like the final nail in the coffin for OnePlus was the official merger with Oppo. OnePlus was doing its own thing pretty successfully, so it didn’t exactly make sense for the two companies to put their heads together just yet. This is especially reflected in OxygenOS, the principal defining feature of OnePlus’s initial success itself. This was a hard-hitting blow from which it only recently came out of, with the release of the OnePlus 11 series. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty on conspiracy theories but there is a fairly detailed Reddit thread that I’ll link here that you can go through:
Deconstructing the Evolution of the Smartphone & Its Implications
When we’re talking about smartphones, we need to go back to the first ever handheld phone ever made, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. That’s right — Motorola was an absolute chad back in the day.
Of course, it had its shortcomings, because it weighed a whole 2 kilograms. Not ideal for most of us, as I’m sure you’d agree. However, the philosophy behind what a phone meant was still essentially the same — it was just a mobile telephone. It was a device that you could make calls with from any part of the world. There was no other purpose for it at the time. However, with time, the functionality of the mobile phone changed.
I am purposefully not getting into the slow evolution of the smartphone because there is so much to explain about the generational leaps that took place from 1 G to 2G to 3G and so on, this isn’t the point of this article, and I am frankly too lazy.
The first touchscreen phone in a primitive rudimentary way was actually developed in 1994 by IBM and they called it…. Simon.
SIMON.
Can we just take a second to think about the creatively degenerate nincompoop who named the phone SIMON!? Simon. SIMON. Why didn’t you call it Richard, John? What about Albert? I’m pretty sure you were an absolute player back in the day, weren’t you John? You would have had so many women lined up for your creative wit and charming attitude. Simon. I’m pretty sure you were planning on calling it Muriel after your dead grandma because that’s how close you must’ve gotten to a woman ever, weren’t you, you lonely assistant manager? IBM probably declined because it was a touchscreen phone and they didn’t want lonely corporate paper pushers finding pleasure in touching something that was as close to a woman as they could get. Simon. The nerve.
Anyway, after a while, came Nokia with the famous indestructible 3310 in the year 2000 CE and that meme hasn’t really died, has it?
However, this form factor of a screen and a physical keypad gave so much room for creative people (yes, actual creative people, IBM) to come up with what was probably the most elaborately varied types of phones to ever exist. There were flip phones, sliding phones, QWERTY keyboard phones, phones with a home button, and so many other variations. There were even such beautiful phones as the Motorola Aura — I mean you have to see it to believe it.
However, internet usage was becoming more and more popular and with the 2G revolution, the meaning of a mobile phone had completely changed. The different styles of phones that were available at the time meant that the phones they carried showed who they were, and with that, the phone became a symbol of personal identity. Flip phones were the hip thing back in 2003 and strangely enough, 20 years later, they still remain so… in a way.
Even companies themselves started building a brand around their phones. Sony became the phone company for music enthusiasts, HTC was where all the latest innovations came first, and Nokia was well known for its sturdy build quality & overall brand value. All companies that were in electronics manufacturing jumped on the bandwagon, from LG to Panasonic to Siemens — all tried their hand. Blackberry became the businessman’s phone and Samsung had also found its place. The attachment people had with their phones only grew all this while because of the social connotations attached to them and then came the iPhone.
The iPhone changed the meaning of a smartphone yet again. Steve Jobs essentially set the template for the modern smartphone with the iPhone. He showed that you could make the phone a functional piece of technology with minimalistic design, while also preserving (or rather extending) the social connotation that came with it. However, what Steve Jobs had not realised was that had found the ideal form factor for the smartphone — the glass slab. He had taken the architectural design principle of ‘form follows function’ and arrived at the dead end of smartphone design innovation.
If you look at the first iPhone and smartphones today, you’ll see that not much has changed in terms of form factor, and there is a reason for that. The form factor of the iPhone made sense. It was all screen and was designed to be used that way. You had multiple functionalities on the same device — it was not just a device to call and communicate, it was a personal entertainment device as well. Another thing that the iPhone brought to the table was inertial scrolling, the feature where the scroll of a page was determined by the speed of the user’s scroll. There were so many things about the iPhone that made it so revolutionary that I could go on for two more pages and the list still wouldn’t end.
So What Does All of This Have to Do with Nothing?
Now, the reason why I took you through a brief tour of smartphone history is to help you understand how the philosophy of smartphones has changed. It went from being a utilitarian handheld communication device to your own personal multifunctional entertainment device. It became an extension of our identity, shaping the very culture we live in. However, this posed a question — what’s next?
With every phone becoming more elaborate iterations of the same glass slab, it takes a lot more to stand out in today’s market. A lot of companies work around the problem with the form factor issue in their own way. Samsung stood by introducing the best displays, Apple itself created its own ecosystem of products and services, Redmi focused on budget-friendly market strategies, Vivo focused on being the ‘camera phone’, Sony found its niche with enthusiasts and camera freaks, and Oppo… is just pushing out phones I guess, I have no idea what they’re doing.
So, Carl Pei understood that if he wanted OnePlus to compete, he would need to make the product and brand stand out as much as possible — which is why he first created hype for the OnePlus One with the invite-only system. Then, by checking all the boxes with all the right features, he built a community not just around the brand but also around himself. He subtly positioned himself as the face of modern innovation in the tech space, and when he left to start Nothing, people from all over the world pitched in to help. These included Casey Neistat (YouTuber), Paddy Cosgrave (co-founder of Web Summit), Kevin Lin (co-founder of Twitch), Tony Fadell (founder & ex-CEO of Nest Labs), Kunal Shah (founder of CRED), Steve Huffman (CEO of Reddit), and so many others. It even managed to garner the interest of people like Yuvraj Singh and Karan Johar for some reason.
Carl Pei’s vision for Nothing was not as revolutionary as Steve Jobs’ impact on smartphones. However, he understood that the smartphone was increasingly becoming far less about performance. Every decision you make in regard to your phone is a conscious one, from the apps you install to the case you put on it. This is why a customised yet unique user experience was the most important aspect of Nothing’s design language — which takes us to the products themselves.
The Apple Competitor?
When Nothing began operations, it compared itself to Apple, and that’s a very bold stand to take for a very young startup. Their first product was the Nothing Ear (1) which was a pretty good well-rounded device, but since they pitched the company as a competitor to Apple, their products started being compared as such. However, I feel like people did not understand what Carl meant when he said that Nothing’s chief competitor was Apple.
Apple may be a trillion-dollar tech company today, but at its core, Apple is a world-class design studio. Apple’s designs define their products as much as their specifications do, and that’s not by accident. Steve Jobs had a very in-depth understanding of industrial and aesthetic design through his experiences at Harvard, calligraphy, and his intuitive design sense. It’s what makes Apple’s products not just technologically innovative but also aesthetically pleasing as well. People take pride in possessing an Apple product.
This is what Carl meant when he said that he’d be competing with Apple — he’s not going to be putting an Android phone against iOS — he’ll be pitting design against design, ecosystem vs ecosystem — and by the looks of it, it seems to be working well so far.
The Electronics Barrier
The modern digital age was made possible because human beings understood how to manipulate the electron — one of the fundamental building blocks of space-time itself. We developed transistors to convert analog signals into digital binary code, and
As scary as this sounds, we’re nearing the end of the electronics era. Devices are becoming thinner, lighter, and smaller, with transistors used in integrated chips (ICs) reaching the size of an atom, we might be reaching the end of digital electronics as we know it. We might need to find ways to fabricate quantum chips, which is really hard to explain and I’m not going to because I have gone down that rabbit hole and there is a lot to explain. This blog has been going on forever as it is.
What Nothing Brings to the Table
Now we come to the climax — the culmination of all these points that I’ve raised over the course of this blog. If you’ve made it this far, follow me on Medium and get notified of new blogs I will be working on in the future.
So, why did Carl Pei start Nothing?
The idea behind Nothing is not to create a premium product that only offers the best. Speaking in car terms, this isn’t a Bugatti or a Rolls Royce. If you look at the Nothing Phone (1) for example, you’ll see that the chipset isn’t the latest one on the market, there are only 2 cameras, the build quality is standard and there’s only 1200 nits of peak brightness. It’s almost as if they are trying to downplay the technical aspect of the phone on purpose — and that is by design.
The Nothing product line isn’t built around luxury but rather around convenience. The About Page of the company reads hence:
“Imagine a world where all of your devices are seamlessly connected. Tech that just works. That you don’t have to think about. That feels like nothing.”
They have played on the strengths of what Carl learned at OnePlus & created the ideal product line:
- Make the price high enough that the lowest common denominator is the middle class, but not too high as to make it ultra-premium — find the sweet spot
- Make the software experience one of the most important selling points of the device
- Build hype using an invite-only system
- Provide exclusivity through hardware products such as the Red Cable Club initiative
The last one is extremely brilliant, not because I think it’s innovative, but because of the sheer simplicity of it. The OnePlus Two shipped with an A to C adapter and cable and they just coloured it red — and that was enough to stand out. If you see a red cable connected to a PC at your workplace, you know that person is a OnePlus user.
This particular idea, this exclusivity through simplicity, is the inherent design ethos that Carl Pei took with him to Nothing. All its products are supposed to look stripped down and naked, and yet have a futuristic beauty to it, which brings us to the elephant in the room — the Glyph Interface.
This is arguably the most talked about tech innovation since the swivel second screen on the LG Wing.
While the Red Cable is merely just a coloured cable, and hence no additional functionality, the glyph interface is a hardware modification that offers exclusivity as well as function. It is a set of 900 bright LEDs on the back of the phone that are used as notification indicators — but it doesn’t end there. It also comes with a set of custom sounds that are synced with the LEDs so that the lights do a little dance when the phone rings. So you can set different settings for different people, hence enabling a unique form of personalization that isn’t seen on any other phone.
Isn’t This All an Elaborate Gimmick?
This has been the main opposition to the Nothing brand in general — the word gimmick has been slapped onto the brand by a lot of naysayers, and I understand where they are coming from. If you take a step back and look at the phone, it isn’t all that impressive. Sure, it checks all the boxes of an upper-middle-range smartphone, but what is the Glyph interface really? At the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of LEDs slapped onto the back of a phone. That’s it. So, in their eyes, it’s just a gimmick. However, I disagree, and there are two main reasons — the impact of polarising design, and the role of personalization.
Polarising Design Strategy
Nothing hasn’t really reinvented the wheel if you think about it. Transparent tech-related accessories have had their fan following for a while now. However, Nothing takes that idea and turns it up to 11, branding itself with that design aesthetic. Now remember, this was a niche aesthetic choice that people liked on an accessory, not as a fundamental part of the phone. With that one move, they had made it mainstream. I’m sure that for a lot of people, it has become uncool. It’s like how BMW makes good cars but a lot of people would go out of their way to avoid buying because of the stereotypes associated with being a BMW owner.
However, this isn’t the first time this has happened either. In fact, polarising design strategy is a very effective way of marketing through word-of-mouth.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. It is an unquantifiable intangible relativistic aspect of aesthetics that simply cannot be compared on a purely objective level… right? Well, I don’t exactly disagree. The fact that the Tesla Cybertruck’s design even gets mixed reactions is proof that beauty (or rather a stylistic choice in this case) is purely a matter of perception.
The goal of the Tesla Cybertruck design was to be a “shocker” — a jarring polarising look that generated media buzz. They played it as a “reinvention of the wheel” when it came to how a pickup truck is & should look like.
Personally, I feel that pickup trucks are the ugliest inventions of the modern age, and adding more angles to them simply makes it worse.
However, I’m not saying I’m a traditionalist when it comes to design either. My perception of design revolves around my personal experiences, and it shapes how I view the world. I’ll give you an example.
This is the Yeezy Foam Runner, a shoe that was born out of Kanye’s design brand, Yeezy. There have been plenty of criticisms about this shoe’s design, calling it ridiculous, abstract, and unattractive. However, to me, this design looks rather fresh and unique. It has kept the barebone skeleton of a traditional aesthetic shoe and puffed it up in places you wouldn’t have. It essentially feels like the concept of the Crocs went through an AI blender and this alien goo solidified into this autistic rubber duck from hell — and for some odd reason, I love it. They seem much more comfortable to wear on a daily basis even though it’s not going to sell that many units. It is supposed to be a style statement, and I honestly think it might look good with shorts. Also, since it’s so alien-looking, you can’t exactly assign a gender to it, making it even more intriguing as much as it is elusive.
Another example in the tech world — folding phones. It’s more fragile, requires greater maintenance, and is likely to have more bugs than regular phones because of the two screens and the bizarre form factor. There is no conceivable practical niche that folding phones occupy.
A lot of people say that they are unnecessary and expensive, while others say it’s just an innovation that was waiting to happen because people like smaller form factors when it comes to handheld devices. It’s just a matter of perspective. I think I’ll be writing another blog about folding phones as this itself is getting too long.
Similarly, I like the aesthetic design choices that Nothing has made. The stripped-down transparent look also means that the aesthetics have to be carefully integrated into the product itself because that’s what the user is seeing. Striking that balance while also making it practical & functional is an appreciable engineering feat if you ask me. A gimmick is something that doesn’t exactly provide any value to the consumer. Making the battery non-removable is a gimmick in my opinion, and so is removing the headphone jack on mobile devices. It offers no functional value and in fact, makes it more difficult for the average user.
Role of Personalization
You might think that adding a bunch of sounds and lights to a phone isn’t very useful, and perhaps it isn’t for a lot of users. You might be a person who just uses their phone to listen to music on the way to work, put it aside during working hours, and scroll through Instagram after getting home — and that’s a very reasonable day for a lot of people. The average user doesn’t care a lot about that extra 12% increase in performance or a 144 Hz refresh rate. However, there are people who view their phones as an extension of their identity, and I consider myself in that category. I’ve briefly owned a Redmi phone and don’t plan to use it in the future. I don’t like MIUI and I don’t like the social connotation of it being the common man’s phone. So, when I had the money, I switched to a mid-range S series Samsung phone. I’m happy with everything, and I’ll switch to Nothing soon if I get the chance. You might think this is just me being picky and selective, but I can prove it’s not.
Apple has always been very anal about the control they have over their products even after it reaches the end user. Even now, it is rumoured that with Apple being forced to use USB-C for their phones, they’re planning on providing fast charging support only to Apple-manufactured cables. So when customization options were brought to the Lock Screen & Widgets with the iOS 16 update, people went crazy — to the point where it became a Twitter trend for a few days. People care about the way their phone looks and feels in their everyday life.
This is where Nothing’s Glyph Interface comes into play. It offers users a unique customization option unlike anything available on the market today. I feel like these aspects of the interface get overlooked when people criticise it for its appearance and choice of design.
Nothing Understands the Future of Smartphones
As I mentioned earlier, as the limitations of electronics are forcing transistors to near the size of atoms, a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling can occur, which can result in reduced efficiency and more heat dissipation. Not immediately, but surely, we are approaching the very end of the digital age and more research is being done to harness the power of the quantum realm. However, I am assuming that this particular future could be further away than we think. In the meantime, the performance of smartphones has already reached a point where the average user goes through their entire day with hardly any lag or performance issues. That is only going to keep getting better. As tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee often says — good phones are getting cheap, cheap phones are getting good. This is when customization and design play an important role, and I believe that this is going to be the future of smartphones. Nothing, according to me, has hit the nail on the head in terms of its carefully chosen position in the smartphone space, and I think it’s going to revolutionise the smartphone industry forever.
