“It’s still too early to discuss individual products, but I can say we’ve launched three smartphones this year, and we’re looking to launch twice that number next year.” That’s Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis, and I’ve read that line three times now because it’s doing more work than it looks like at first glance. Three phones in 2026 were the Phone (4a) Pro, the Phone (4a), and the Phone (4b), and every single one of them lives in the entry-to-mid range. There was no flagship this year. CEO Carl Pei told people back in January not to expect one, and Nothing actually kept that promise, which by phone-industry standards counts as remarkable honesty on its own.

Doubling the lineup sounds like a growth story, and I’m sure that’s exactly how it’ll get pitched closer to launch. But the more interesting sentence is the one right after it, about the phone that isn’t coming back yet. Evangelidis was asked directly about the CMF Phone 3 Pro, the budget flagship Nothing killed in July after RAM and component costs blew through whatever margin the thing was designed around. “We pulled the plug quite late,” he admitted, which is its own small confession about how far into development it got before the spreadsheet won. Then: “We’re looking at different ways on how we could make it happen for next year. But that’s still in consideration. We’re staying close to how the memory price will evolve.”

That’s not a company teasing a comeback. That’s a company telling you, in public, that a real product decision is currently sitting on a live memory-pricing chart, and nobody there knows which way it moves next. I find that more useful than a roadmap slide would be. Most OEMs would either announce the revival with fake confidence or just never mention the cancelled SKU again and hope nobody remembers. Nothing is doing neither, and it’s consistent with how the company has handled its own delays before: publicly, awkwardly, and with enough specificity that you can actually track whether they’re telling the truth.

The flagship question is the bigger one hiding in “twice the number.” A real Phone (4) has been the thing people actually want from Nothing since the Phone (3) came out, and it’s been pushed for so long that I’ve actually lost track of how many quarters it’s been “not this year.” If six-ish phones in 2027 means the flagship finally lands alongside a wider spread of mid-range and CMF-branded devices, that’s Nothing growing up into a real multi-tier company the way it’s been trying to position itself for two years now. If it means six more variations on the Phone (4a) formula and the actual flagship slips again, “twice the number” is just a bigger denominator hiding the same problem.

What I do trust is that Nothing hasn’t slowed down on the accessory side while the phone math got complicated. CMF’s new open-ear Clip Pro earbuds ship August 15 at $99, three-point titanium clip design, LDAC support, the works, priced to undercut the open-ear competition the same way the Ear (a) undercut Nothing’s own flagship buds two years ago. That’s the same instinct that’s made Nothing X occasionally overwhelming as an app but a lot of fun as a hardware company: ship something small and weird while the bigger bets are still being priced out. It’s the same three-tier gamble the company has been running since it split CMF out as its own budget arm, just with the middle tier currently on hold.

I own a Phone (3) and I’ve made a habit of 3D-printing my own cases for it, so take my read here with whatever grain of salt that implies. But I’d rather have a company that tells me a product is stuck behind a DRAM chart than one that just quietly never ships it. We’ll know a lot more once memory prices either keep climbing through 2027 or finally crack, and Nothing has just told us, on the record, which number it’s watching.

Sources