The first Nothing product I ever bought was the Phone(1) and not a pair of transparent earbuds in 2021 (My standards are too high when it comes to audio devices and products, quality over design). And even back then, nobody in the US had heard the name. Phone (1) sat on my desk, looking like something left half-finished on purpose (Grr OTAs and software). I was in, but because we need competitors, disruption, and a stimulated market that benefits users. I’d followed Carl Pei out of the OnePlus years; I knew the playbook, and I wanted to watch him try to build the thing he kept describing with Akis’s help.
So the Phone (1) launched in 2022, and the US got the worst version of the launch (and I bought mine while traveling back to France at that time). Versus Europe, no proper retail, no carrier support worth the name, and a “beta program” you paid a few hundred dollars to join so you could run a phone that barely held 5G outside one T-Mobile band.
Even if I dodged the bullet here, thanks to being European and being at the right time at the right moment, I was loud about it at the time. It’s not that the phone was bad. The phone was lovely. It’s that being a Nothing fan in America meant importing enthusiasm that the company wasn’t ready to sell you.
The Phone (2) in 2023 was the first time Nothing actually showed up for the US, flagship Snapdragon silicon (huge pro for me), a real launch, the brand saying out loud that America was a priority. So, the gap between what I wanted Nothing to be and what it actually was kept shrinking.
These days the Phone (3) series is my daily driver. It falls straight out of the design philosophy Nothing has spent five years testing against reality: transparency as an argument instead of a gimmick, hardware you’re meant to notice rather than forget. Even if I kind of prefer the Glyph Led to the Matrix itself.
What kept me around longer than any single product is the part most brands can’t fake. Nothing built a company with around 13,000 community investors actually holding shares. The community isn’t a word stapled on after the fact. It’s wired into how the thing is owned. Carl has called having a community-elected voice on the board both important and kind of annoying, which might be the most honest thing I’ve heard a founder say about community.
Antonio announced he’s joining Nothing as the US Community Representative. If you’ve spent any time in these communities, you already know him. He’s been a member, a moderator, a creator, the person who turns up in the beta threads and actually helps, long before any title was attached to it. I’ve known Antonio for years. We came up through the same Tech pipeline; we’ve argued about software, cultural differentiation, consumers’ needs, and brands’ necessity, and we’ve obsessed over the small details only enthusiasts care about, and he’s a good person. Not a hype man. Someone who likes tech and even more the people around it.
So this is a good fit. His stated goals are to help creators grow, help members get involved, and connect people who care about tech, which is a fair description of what Antonio already does on a normal Tuesday. Putting him in the seat is nothing, recognizing something the community figured out a long time ago.
The timing works too. Nothing just walked its phones into more than 500 Best Buy stores across the US on June 12, the largest physical retail footprint the brand has ever had here. An American can now hold a Phone (3) before buying it instead of taking my word for it on a blog. There’s still no carrier deal, so most people won’t buy one the way they normally buy phones, but the brand finally exists in the real world here, not just in import boxes and forum threads.
That’s why a US community voice matters now, and it’s why Antonio opening with “what do you want to see” is the right first question. Since he asked, here’s my answer.
I want meetups that aren’t disguised product launches. I want users gathering IRL and capturing slices of life naturally, laughs, cheerings, while glasses rise up, I want photowalks, exchange of good ideas, I want people respecting each other and not doing that for their own personal goals, and trying to gain notoriety or followers. Get a room of Nothing people together in a US city and let us bring our goods to go, our wishes, and our complaints. I want a structured, real consumer/user creator and reviewer program with actual hardware access (no loan), time to really do a deep dive, and coherent reviews, feedback, and improvement ideas, so the people already evangelizing this brand on social aren’t running on goodwill. I want store demos at those Best Buys (or demos in a dive bar or on the lake shore) that show what the device (and, obviously, their signature Glyph Matrix) does, instead of letting it sit dark on a table. And I want the US community to be treated the way nothing treats its 13,000 investors, like people with a stake rather than a mailing list.
None of that is wishful. The pieces are on the table now. There’s real US retail for the first time, and there’s finally someone whose job is to connect the American side of a brand that wrote community into its own ownership.
I’m happy for Antonio. He earned this one. Let’s see what we build with it.
Antonio’s announcement is here.
If you want in, the Nothing Community is where it happens, and @nothing is worth a follow.