damn inflation. Everything is more expensive than ever and this creates a dangerous vicious circle. It costs companies more to produce, but ultimately it is the users who pay the price. The last duck is called Nothing Ear (1).

What happened?. Carl Pei, CEO of Nothing announced He announced on Twitter on October 26 that the price of the Nothing Ear headphones (1) would increase from the current $99 to $149. This represents an amazing 50% increase.

arguments. He adds that the root cause is “increase in costs.” In the next thread, Pei explains, “We had three engineers when we started development. A year later we had 185 engineers.”

They’re better now, he says. In addition, he explains that they’ve released fifteen updates in the last few months, and that “it’s a completely different product than the one we’ve released.”

But. All of the technology we purchase has a guaranteed support and update period where (at the very least) bugs, conflicts or potential security vulnerabilities are fixed. Improvements and new features are added frequently, and this has (almost) always been before the price of the product has risen. Pei’s argument is controversial, to say the least.

inflation attacks. Of course, there are a few companies that affect the effects of inflation on the last batch of products. Apple’s iPhone 14s are a good example of this. Google, on the other hand, kept the prices of the Pixel 7 low.

Difficult justification. The increase in ear (1) is certainly phenomenal, especially considering that manufacturing costs tend to fall over time, allowing for example Sony and Microsoft, which lose money with every console sold, to start reversing this trend. It’s particularly striking that it’s the same hardware product, and it’s very difficult to justify a 50% increase even though costs have risen.