Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus who parted ways with the company last year, announced the name of his next venture: Nothing. Describing itself as a “London-based consumer technology company”, it considers iPod inventor Tony Fadell, co-founder of Twitch, Kevin Lin, Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, and YouTuber Casey Neistat investors. He plans to release his first “smart devices” in the first half of this year.
“Nothing’s mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future,” Pei, founder and CEO of Nothing, said in a press release. “We believe that the best technology is beautiful, yet natural and intuitive to use. If it is sufficiently advanced, it should disappear into the background and feel like nothing. ”
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What is currently unclear is exactly which products have nothing planned to release. In an interview with The edge Prior to today’s announcement, Pei did not want to give specific details on what form Nothing’s first “smart devices” will take. He also did not want to say with which companies Nothing plans to compete.
However, Pei confirms that Nothing intends to release products in various categories, with the ultimate goal of building an ecosystem of devices.
‘At the moment … the team is being built, so we want to concentrate on simpler categories,’ says Pei, ‘but as our team gains capabilities and skills, we want to build. The ultimate vision is to connect everything in a seamless way, this can only happen if you have several categories of products connected. ”
During Pei’s tenure at OnePlus, the company released everything from smartphones to headphones and even TVs. Last year, Wired reports that Pei’s new company can concentrate on music and manufacture headphones. When asked, Pei did not want to confirm whether headphones would count among Nothing’s earlier products. On a question by Wired, he said the company’s plans “are so much more than that.”
Although it is speculated that this may indicate that Nothing would develop an associated music service, Pei says The edge that Nothing at least initially plans to make the most of its money by selling hardware rather than software subscribers. “We did not spend too much time thinking about the software part of it,” says Pei. “It should definitely be a good user experience if you want to earn revenue from software.” In the long run, however, he acknowledges that a ‘healthy business’ requires good hardware and good software.
Pei’s new company plans to make a distinction from the outset by using components in their products. Pei suggests that this will prevent Nothing’s products from looking too much like its competitors. “There is a reason why many products on the market are very similar,” Pei notes. “It’s because they share a lot of the same components and the same building blocks.”
In contrast, OnePlus’ phones have been criticized over the years for the similarities they shared with Oppo’s phones. In a recent video, Marques Brownlee outlined a range of Oppo and OnePlus devices with strikingly similar hardware, such as the OnePlus 5 and Oppo R11, the OnePlus 6T and Oppo R17, and the OnePlus Nord N100 and Oppo A53. The two brands even use similar fast charging technologies. OnePlus has Dash Charge and Oppo has VOOC.
Although it is widely reported that OnePlus and Oppo exist under the same Chinese corporate giant BBK Electronics, Pei says nothing is hampered by such an arrangement. ‘[Nothing is] a completely independent company owned by our founding team and our investors, ‘says Pei, with its own R&D division. And despite using contract makers to build their devices, Pei says that nothing will not just rebrand someone else’s products. ”
But while Pei hopes that Nothing’s early products will contain ‘differentiated’ designs without ‘feeling different to be different’, the ultimate hope is that they should disappear into the background.
“I see a kind of grass field with people having picnics and there is no screen, there is no laptop, there is no phone screen, there is no smartwatch screen, there is no billboard screen,” Pei think. “It’s a kind of end state.”
Edge Columnist Walt Mossberg referred to this future situation in 2017 as ‘ambient computing’. Pei admits that it can take 20 or 30 years to arrive, but he says the future his business is striving for is one where technology seems … well, nothing.