Nothing: Hope For The Future Of Tech

My old phone died, a Pixel 8 Pro, and I'd been watching Nothing for a while before that happened. So when it finally gave up I didn't really think twice. I went and got a Nothing Phone 3a Lite and a pair of Ear (a) buds. On a spec sheet that's a downgrade from what I had. I don't care. It's the best phone I've owned.

The moment that actually sold me wasn't anything in a review, it was just pairing the headphones to the phone for the first time, it's completely seamless. The battery widget just appears, the case pops up on screen the second you open it, the whole thing behaves exactly like AirPods do with an iPhone. And this was a fifty-something euro pair of earbuds talking to a budget phone. Genuinely wasn't expecting that from something this cheap.

Here's the thing people don't get when I tell them I picked this over something with actual flagship guts, I don't need the power. I make calls, I text people, I watch a stupid amount of YouTube, I take photos, I do a bit of light editing. None of that needs a flagship chipset, what it needs is software that doesn't get in my way and looks good doing it, and that's exactly what I'd rather pay for than another camera sensor I'll never use. And that's really the whole argument against the rest of the industry for me. Android and iOS have both been quietly enshittified for years now. More slop stapled onto every update, less freedom to actually control your own device, everything sanded down into the same beige experience so it offends nobody and sells to everybody. My old Pixel 8 Pro is the perfect example. Genuinely great specs. Genuinely no personality whatsoever. It did everything well and made me feel nothing. The iPhone isn't quite as bad, but it's drifting the same way, year by year, update by update.

I think about this a lot in terms of old tech, stuff that people my age grew up with. Windows 7, the DS, the PS2, the 360. All completely different from each other. You could recognise any of them blind, by the sound they made booting up or the shape of them in your hands. Now everything's been optimised to be as inoffensive as possible, because inoffensive sells to the most people, and that's the whole game now. Maximise the addressable market, cut anything that might put someone off. Individuality is the casualty, Nothing is one of the only companies that seems to have noticed this is a bad trade.

You feel it in the small stuff, not one big gimmick. The look of it is minimal but still bold, still clearly a choice rather than an absence of choices. Then the sound design and the haptics stack on top of that, little touches that don't need to exist and exist anyway. None of these features on their own is a big deal, but all of it together is a genuinely novel, aesthetic experience, which sounds like a strange thing to say about a phone, but it's true, and it's the first time a device has made me feel that way in years. I don't have a specific project of mine that proves this yet, but it's not really about one project. It's the whole lens I want to design through going forward, not just for cars, for anything I put my name on. I'd rather chase how something feels and looks than how it benchmarks, and I think people resonate with that just as much, maybe more. Nothing's proof of it.

Cars are having exactly this argument right now, and most of them are losing it the same way phones did. Look at what most manufacturers have done with electrification, it removed the excuse of packaging everything around a combustion engine, gave everyone the freedom to actually design something distinct, and almost nobody used that freedom for anything interesting. Audi is a big culprit in my opinion, a brand with a genuinely strong identity that spent the last decade trying to please absolutely everyone, and lost the thing that made it Audi in the process. Porsche's the counter-example. Whatever you think of the lineup, a 911 today still carries the same basic silhouette it had back in 1963, even though everything underneath it has been reinvented a dozen times over. It's a choice to keep an identity instead of optimising it away, and you could say the same thing about almost every mainstream manufacturer on the market right now, they've all made the same choice as Audi.

There's one thing about all this that still annoys me a bit. Nothing shipped ads on the lock screen on the update my own phone runs, but held it back on the pricier models after people kicked off, and kept it on mine anyway. It doesn't actually bother me day to day, but it did put a small crack in the trust, the whole point of buying into this brand was that it wasn't supposed to pull tricks like that. I'll give them some grace here though. They're still a young company competing on price to grab market share, and margins at that end of the market are thin. It's a mistake I understand rather than one I'm willing to write off the whole company for. Because here's what actually matters, and it's the reason I wrote any of this, Nothing is showing the rest of the industry something most of them have forgotten is possible. Let your community lead, and actually listen to them instead of just mining them for data and money. Take a genuinely bold swing on design instead of playing it safe for the broadest possible audience. And do all of that while keeping the price honest, prioritising the experience you're actually giving someone over squeezing the maximum margin out of them. Nothing is one company proving you can serve the person buying the product, keep innovating, and still turn a profit, all at the same time. Most of the industry has convinced itself you have to pick two, Nothing is the best argument that you don't.

That's ultimately the standard I want to hold my own work to, not just something I admire from the sidelines. Whatever I end up designing, cars or otherwise, I don't want it judged on performance. I want it judged on emotion, whether someone actually wants it, reaches for it, feels something using it. Nothing didn't get their success by chasing the biggest number, they got it by chasing the best feeling. That's their whole philosophy, and it's the one I'm taking with me.

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