CMF won’t – CMF, Nothing’s budget brand, won’t launch a new phone this year. Co-founder Akis Evangelidis says soaring memory prices make it impossible to build a successor to the Phone Pro 2 that both feels like a genuine upgrade and still fits CMF’s price expectations. W
For anyone waiting on CMF’s next move, the answer—at least for 2026—is a clear no.
CMF, the budget brand owned by Nothing, will not be releasing a follow-up to its Phone Pro 2 this year. CMF’s parent company’s co-founder. Akis Evangelidis. said in a post on X that CMF is working on a successor. but that current memory prices are stopping it from making a phone that “feels like a genuine step forward” at a price that still makes sense for CMF.
The reasoning is blunt: even if the engineering team has a direction, the economics have tightened. Evangelidis pointed to the fact that the subsidiary can’t build a device that meets the brand’s expectations on performance and affordability at the moment.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. RAM prices have risen sharply over the past year, driven by supply shortages. The squeeze. according to the explanation shared around this cycle. has come partly because manufacturers are redirecting production toward massive AI buildouts. In the same period, both Apple and Samsung have warned that price increases are coming as RAM costs climb.
The knock-on effects are already being felt beyond phones. The IDC predicted that PC shipments could shrink by almost 10 percent this year due to higher prices. In a world where memory is a key input for everything from smartphones to computers. the impact lands far wider than any single handset launch schedule.
CMF last launched the Phone Pro 2 in April last year. At the time, the brand positioned it as its lightest and slimmest smartphone to date, and claimed it could last two days on a single charge.
A few months after Phone Pro 2 arrived. Nothing spun off CMF into an independent subsidiary headquartered in India. which Evangelidis and the brand have previously treated as the company’s strongest market. Even with that push into a more focused structure. CMF now finds itself constrained by the same global component pressures squeezing the industry.
So the phone delay doesn’t mean CMF is going silent. Evangelidis said that while the next phone won’t arrive this year, CMF will launch several new products. He also added that the brand plans “some entirely new categories.”
The sequence of the decisions is telling: CMF is aiming for an upgrade, but when memory prices make that upgrade harder to price competitively, the launch gets postponed—while the company pivots toward other product plans instead.
Nothing CMF Phone Pro 2 Akis Evangelidis RAM prices memory prices smartphone AI buildouts Apple Samsung IDC India mobile tech