Every since Yanko Design created some concept photos of Nothing over-ear headphones in 2022, Nothing fans have been hoping they would become a real product, especially after Nothing founder Carl Pei called the designs "crazy cool" in a social media post. Well, now Nothing has posted a video of its product design team discussing over-ear headphones titled "We're making over-ear headphones." They'll be released this summer, according to the video, and rival the AirPods Max in terms of sound quality but cost a lot less.
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To a certain degree, the designers spend much of the video trashing premium over-ear cans and come across as super arrogant. "We don't really like a single over-ear headphone that's on the market," one designer says. And at the start of the video we hear them mocking the name of the new $450 Sony WH-1000XM6 and commenting about the headband being a little "fatter."
Although Yanko Design's post from 2022 refers to the headphones as the Nothing Head (1), which would be a pretty logical name for the headphones (or simply Nothing Head), the video doesn't mention what the name for the new Nothing over-ear headphones will be or how much they'll cost. Presumably the headphones will have some of the same translucent elements that help distinguish the company's earbuds from other noise-canceling buds on the market. Its $150 Nothing Ear buds are on CNET's list of best wireless earbuds and best noise-canceling earbuds and its $130 Nothing Ear (Open) buds are on our list of best open earbuds.
Nothing recently announced a partnership with UK audio company KEF. According to a Nothing spokesperson, the partnership "will support Nothing's expansion into new audio categories -- with several acoustically co-developed products already in the works and launching later this year." This over-ear model is likely the first audio product to come out of that partnership.
I look forward to testing the new Nothing over-ear headphones when they're released this summer. Hopefully, they live up to the hype and are as good a value as the designers say they will be.
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