How Nothing designed its Ear 1 earphones to beat Apple’s AirPods

Nothing’s head of design explains how the company created its Ear 1 earphones to take on Apple’s AirPods Pro, at a fraction of the cost

When your design motif is transparent tech, the quest to make the tangle of wires and jumble of components look attractive beneath clear plastic can take an unexpected toll. Nothing discovered this the hard way making its Ear 1 wireless earbuds, that brand’s first product. Among many unexpected manufacturing hurdles, the company headed by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei got fired by not one but two magnet factories.

The trouble was that as you can physically see the magnets in both the case and in the arms of new Ear 1s, they had to be highly polished. But magnet factories don’t usually do this, so quality control was a problem. “As a startup, we don’t have the biggest volumes. But we were so damn annoying in our requests they were, like, ‘OK, just find somebody else.’ So the factory that ended up supporting us was actually the third,” says Pei.

It’s fair to say that Pei and the Nothing team have taken the art of drip-feeding news to a new level with the Ear 1s, revealing glimpses of design concepts, issuing press releases on the model name, retail partners, and even attempting to get coverage on the design of just the case. The trouble with these calculated tactics is that after such a manipulated buildup, the final earphones had better be good.

Almost annoyingly, they are. The Ear 1s are Nothing’s aggressive attempt at taking on Apple’s mighty AirPods Pro. For just £99 here or $99 in the US, you get an all too familiar design, but crucially one that’s undeniably different from Apple’s offering; you get active noise cancelling; IPX4 water resistance; gesture controls; Bluetooth 5.2; an 11.6mm driver with a 0.34cc chamber for bass; a battery life of 4 hours with ANC and 24 hours with the case charge (5.7 and 34 hours with it off); fast charging; a wireless charging case with USB C port; in-ear detection; and a weight of just 4.7g per earbud.

So these are lighter, last longer and have a bigger driver and chamber than the AirPods Pro. They have nearly all the same features (apart from spatial audio), yet cost significantly less than half the price. Plump for the Ear 1s and you save a whopping £150 compared to its Apple rival. You could by two pairs and still have £50 to buy some over-ears, even. What’s more, we’ve had a listen, and they sound much better than they have any right to. We’ll let you know if they beat the Pros in a few days.

Ahead of the launch today, we sat down with Pei and Thomas Howard, creative director at Nothing and vice head of design at Teenage Engineering, makers of the much-lauded OD-11 wireless speaker, to talk through exactly how they came up with, on the face of it, such a competitive set of true wireless earbuds to the all-conquering AirPods.