According to the latest news, Nothing’s debut earbuds, Nothing Ear (1) will come with a price tag of $99 / €99 / £99. It will come with active noise cancellation (ANC) feature. This is confirmed by none other than the company’s founder Carl Pei himself. Recently, Pei revealed this in an interview with TechCrunch.
In order to enable ANC, each earbud of Nothing Ear (1) will be equipped with three mics. The company said the earbud will be initially launched in the UK, India, Europe, and North America following their announcement on July 27th.
Pei, was one of the co-founders of OnePlus. Pei believes with the help of its powerful ANC capability, Ear (1) will be able to position itself as a competitor to Apple’s $249 AirPods Pro.
It should be noted that ANC has become an increasingly common feature on mid range true wireless earbuds. For example, just to let you know, the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro cost $130, while Amazon’s second generation Echo Buds is priced at $120 and both the devices come with ANC feature.
Still, as of now, there are plenty of earbuds in the market that comes without any noise cancellation technology at this price point. For example, Google’s Pixel Buds A-Series is comparable with the above two examples in terms of price but it does not come with a noise cancellation technology.
Note that in the TechCrunch interview, Nothing’s founder Carl Pei has also used clarified why Nothing decided to acquire the Essential brand. He said, “Before we were called Nothing, ‘Essential’ was one of the names we were brainstorming, internally. So that’s why we’ve acquired the trademark. We don’t have any plans to do anything with Essential.”
Frankly, this is a very unconventional thing to hear that Nothing has decided to acquire accompany just for the sake of the name. Note that Essential was started by Android creator Andy Rubin after he left Google. The company was shut down in early 2020 after it released just one handset.
