CMF has spent three years making Nothing’s design language cheaper without making it feel cheap, and the Clip Pro is the clearest proof yet. Announced on August 4 and priced at just $99, it’s the sub-brand’s first entry into open-ear earbuds — a category still dominated by names charging two or three times as much. What CMF is betting on isn’t a new sound signature, but a new way of touching your music at all.
A budget label with design ambitions describes CMF since Carl Pei spun it off from Nothing in 2023, built specifically to bring the parent brand’s transparent, playful industrial design down to accessible price points — a lineage that runs through pieces like the Nothing Ear 3. The CMF Clip Pro marks the studio’s first attempt at the open-ear format that’s been gaining ground against traditional in-ear buds, arriving in Dark Grey, Light Grey, and Coral.
The engineering lives in the clip itself: rather than sealing the ear canal, Clip Pro rests against the outer ear using what CMF calls its OpenFit Arc system, held in place by a 3-point support structure built around a slim, elastic titanium wire C-bridge. The bridge flexes to fit a wide range of ear shapes without concentrating pressure on any single point, which is the difference between clips that pinch after twenty minutes and ones you forget you’re wearing.
Sound comes from a 10.8mm dual-magnet driver, housed inside a 13.8mm “listening ball” that projects audio directly toward the ear canal instead of relying on a sealed fit to do the work. To compensate for the bass loss that typically plagues open designs, CMF built in its Ultra Bass Technology, paired with Hi-Res Audio certification and support for LDAC, AAC, and SBC — codecs that usually don’t show up at this price point.
Calls get dedicated hardware too: four HD microphones handle voice pickup, with one specifically engineered for wind resistance, feeding into CMF’s VPU-powered Clear Voice Technology. A Sound Seal system manages mid and high frequencies to keep both music and conversations from leaking to whoever’s standing next to you, with separate toggles for calls and playback inside the Nothing X app.
The case carries the signature move: a tactile, rotating Smart Dial sits on top, letting you adjust volume, skip tracks, answer calls, and pair devices without touching a phone — a physical gesture in the same spirit as the tactile controls on the Nothing Headphone 1, standing in for what’s usually buried in a touch-control gesture library nobody remembers.
Battery numbers land ahead of the format’s usual ceiling: Clip Pro runs 10 hours on a single charge and up to 32.5 hours with the case, with a long-battery mode stretching that to 36 hours; ten minutes in the case returns four hours of playback. Bluetooth 5.4 brings dual-device pairing and a low-latency gaming mode, Google Fast Pair and Microsoft Swift Pair are both supported, and the whole thing carries an IP54 rating for dust and light splash resistance.
None of this chases spec sheets — it’s trying to make the format make sense at a third of the price, undercutting Nothing’s own Ear (Open) and rivals like Bose’s clip-style earbuds while still shipping Hi-Res audio, a dedicated wind-resistant mic, and a control surface most competitors reserve for flagship pricing.
What stays with you isn’t any single spec, but the dial: in a category built almost entirely around touch panels and app menus, CMF put a physical, clickable wheel back into the loop, a small, deliberately old-fashioned gesture in a very new kind of earbud.
CMF Clip Pro by CMF (Nothing) | Price: $99, pre-order $79 (£79) — Colors: Dark Grey, Light Grey, Coral — Available: nothing.tech, from August 15, 2026 (US, UK, Japan); September 15, 2026 (Europe and rest of world, excluding India)