How This Startup Designed 'Ear 1s' to Beat AirPods

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 earphones, that brand’s first product. Among many unexpected manufacturing hurdles, the company headed by OnePlus cofounder 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 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 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-canceling; IPX4 water resistance; gesture controls; Bluetooth 5.2; an 11.6-mm driver with a 0.34-cc 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 4.7 grams 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 buy 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 on Tuesday, 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. 

WIRED UK: Clear design has been done before. It made Jony Ive famous. Why did you choose this route?

Thomas Howard: When we first started to think about Nothing, there was this idea to ‘own' transparency. We’re not going to win the tech race, that’s for sure. But if we want to even have a chance, we need to get really good at engineering. So let’s just do away with the facade, get rid of everything that’s on the exterior and turn ourselves to the insides, because that’s what matters. 

From a distance, you get intrigued but things feel quite simple, and then slowly as you start to look at the surface, that’s when the details of the product reveal themselves. But, then again, we didn’t really know what sort of problems transparency would cause.

Problems? 

TH: The biggest thing was the glue to fuse the two sides of the transparent housing together. We have been through many, many, many iterations—even up until last week—to find the right balance. If you do it wrong, you’ll see glue all the way around the edge. So it will not appear transparent anymore. Instead it will be diffused. It throws the whole thing off balance.

We tried alternatives to glue, various types of laser welding, ultrasonic welding—things that might be more friendly to the yield, but, of course, it’s a learning process for us. It just wasn’t at the top of our minds [when we started], but for future products now it’s the first thing that we think about.

Carl Pei: The yield rate for Ear 1s is only 50 percent. We want to get it to the 90s. We’re improving day by day. 

Is this why you haven’t opted to make the earbuds or case completely clear? It's just too hard and you get such a high production failure rate?

TH: We set ourselves the challenge of revealing as much of the engineering as possible on Ear 1 and the case. But you have to strive to make products that are as neutral as possible. They need to feel balanced and not scream “engineering” at you. So we choose to obscure, or package, some components, to not detract or distract. That’s why we have this large white block inside of the case. But we did as much as we possibly could to make it transparent. 

CP: A lot of us were uninspired by consumer tech looking more and more the same. It was  important to find a design language we could stick with. Jesper [Kouthoofd, founder and CEO of Teenage Engineering] showed us a picture from the Sony museum where there were a bunch of products on the wall. You could see a consistent vision. Companies today don’t really have a design vision, they just do whatever is in fashion each quarter. 

The trick is to find something different that’s also desirable, but not just different for the sake of it. Pure transparent design, where you see everything on the earbuds and also the case, does not fulfill that criteria. We want to make the products accessible to more people. It would have been very niche if it was fully transparent.

What is it with all the dots? The dot logo. The texture dots on the case. The red dot on the right earbud. 

TH: We were trying to remove jobs for ourselves that we don’t like. We had to design a logo. We wanted the look to be industrial. So … [Howard pulls out something that looks like a large gun.] This is amazing, this thing. It’s what they use to mark pipes in industrial environments where you can’t print on them. It squirts out a kind of ink. But it’s basically a dot matrix. We thought, let’s let a machine design the logo for us. See where that route takes us. Then we started to use that typeface for a lot of stuff.

Is that red dot on the right earbud an attempt to fix one of the continuing annoyances of AirPods Pro, trying to work out which bud goes in which side of the case?

TH: Absolutely. We had an advantage. You come into a category where there’s stuff already out, and we’ve all had experience with using others, like the AirPods Pro. And you run into these issues. So what a fantastic opportunity then to be able to jump in and try to solve some of those things. Also one of the great advantages of having a transparent case that you know whether the earbuds are in or out. It’s also about challenging how things are done by our friends over in Silicon Valley. We’re trying to have a conversation, in a way, through our products. 

The Apple references in your design for Ear 1 are interesting. There are so many competitors to AirPods Pro, and most are trying to make ones that clearly signal they are a similar product. Now the Ear 1s do look very like AirPods, but, thanks to that transparency, are sufficiently different to have a separate identity. Is that intentional?

TH: Good observation. Yeah, you’re onto something with that sort of thinking.

How many prototype designs did you get through?

CP: I would say this final one is the third earbud design, and I think it’s the second case design. Our original launch time was April. But changing suppliers over and over again to find people who wanted to support us with the magnets and the glue, and countless of other stuff, delayed us. 

TH: The design process took just a couple of days. We started with a variant that looked like a pipe [top image, far left]. We were talking about transparency, but when Carl saw this he was like, ‘OK, what happened to all the talk of transparency?’ So then we tried a ‘milky’ look, and then thought maybe we can work with the FPC [flexible printed circuit] and celebrate all of the components of the stick instead. 

The golden rule is that if you look at something for the first time just for a couple of seconds and then you turn away, and someone asks you to make a sketch of it, you should be able to. There should be some detail that you can remember. For a Porsche, it’s the headlights.

Now, the FPC is basically a highway that that holds the microphones. In a typical construction for an earbud that has a stick; you need to have an FPC that’s bringing the microphone from the bottom all the way to the top with some kind of internal structure. We got lucky there that there was already a lot of stuff to work with. 

We thought, ‘What are the hero things about the earbud? It’s that you can you can listen to music, and that you can talk with it.’ We do that a lot now, and it’s shifted even more in the last couple of years. So we wanted to celebrate the mics in an interesting way. So we brought them to the surface and worked with details like the cover mesh. 

We also tried to create an iconic shape with the FPC, so you have this hanging stick with one microphone and then a tiny little place for all of the circuits to go through up to the other microphone. We sketched a lot with this shape. 

Usually we work in two dimensions [at Teenage Engineering]. We always sketch flat. That doesn’t work when you’re trying to work with the human ear. Fortunately, a colleague of mine has some experience with this and a lot of papers on the ergonomics of human ears. So she helped us to find the right dimensions to come up with something that we knew we could iterate on that wasn’t going to cause problems down the line with ergonomics.

Another problem was the FPC, because we thought we could print on it whatever we wanted. Usually we’re working with bigger products where we do little sketches and artworks hidden on the PCB. We took the same approach here thinking that that would be absolutely possible on a tiny scale at mass volume. It definitely wasn’t. But we have added this knurling done on the top layer of the FPC in copper to show off the surface.

A common trick for manufacturers is to go bass heavy, to fool the user into initially thinking they’re getting a better quality listen than they really are. You’ve shunned this approach?

CP: For the hardware, we considered having two drivers, but we felt the additional weight for each earbud versus the improvement in sound quality just wasn’t worth the tradeoff. Product management is all about tradeoffs, and we felt that with the large 11.6-mm driver we have, with the right tuning, we can produce some good sound.

TH: Teenage Engineering helped a lot with that tuning. Who are we to guess or say how we should build on top of any music that a musician or an artist has worked for on for however long? So we always strive to have a profile that’s as balanced and neutral as possible. As a starting point, that’s super, super important. And it’s actually not the easiest way. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to throw a bunch of signal processing on top of things.

Apple is doubling down on spatial audio. Why did you not include this?

CP: We had some discussions early on about spatial audio. For it to work really well it needs to start at the source. So the recording has to be done in a special way. You can take current recordings and retrofit them into spatial audio, but it doesn’t sound as good. So we made the call. Once there’s more recordings with this at the source, then we will consider it.

How have you managed to make these Ear 1s, with most of the AirPods Pro features, for £99 ($138)? What’s the secret sauce? Even the new OnePlus Buds Pro cost much more than this.

CP: It goes back to our business model. We’re more direct to consumer. That doesn’t mean we don’t work with sales channels, but a large portion of our business is going to happen on our own website, which means there’s fewer middlemen, and we can deliver a great product at a reasonable price.

But that’s not a magic bullet. There’s component costs, manufacturing issues, of which you’ve had more than your fair share.

CP: If you look at the bill of materials for this product, it’s been a constant evolving equation. We originally wanted to price the product at £79 ($110)—then we had to revise it up to £99 ($138). 

You said you were going to be a new kind of audio company when you launched Nothing. But your first hardware is the obvious inaugural product. 

CP: This is our first category, and we picked a category where we felt we can make a difference. We looked at what was available on the market. A lot of products look like AirPods. And it’s also a fast-growing category. But it’s just the first step for us. we’ll have something else this year as well.

You’re stuck with your clear design motif though, aren’t you? Knowing what you know now, dealing with all the issues of transparent design on this first product, do you regret not going another way?

CP: No. I couldn’t be happier with the result. It’s better than what I expected.

This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.