Nothing’s Akis Evangelidis cancels CMF successor this year over RAM price surge

Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis just pulled the plug on CMF’s next phone for this year. In a post on X, he said Nothing was working on a successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro, but RAM prices where they are right now mean the company “can’t build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF,” so Nothing has decided “not to launch a new CMF phone this year.”

That is the headline, but here is the real consequence: even when a brand has product momentum, hardware procurement can overrule ambition. Evangelidis is effectively admitting that the company cannot justify the next performance jump, at the CMF price point customers associate with the line, because memory costs have become structurally too expensive.

This is the latest chapter in what people are calling “RAMageddon,” and it matters because RAM is not some optional accessory. In modern phones, more memory typically means the device can hold more apps and heavier workloads without aggressive background reloads, and it often tracks with the “feels faster” experiences that differentiate upgrades. When RAM gets pricier, the math changes immediately. Either the phone ships with less-than-expected specs, or the selling price rises. For a budget sub-brand like CMF, raising prices can undermine the whole point of the tier.

Nothing’s situation has been spilling into the rest of its lineup as well. The Verge reports that last week, Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei said the RAM shortage has impacted the cost of the company’s mid-range phone. Specifically, Pei stated, “For Phone 4A, memory costs doubled between …” (The Verge’s excerpt cuts off there, but the key point is clear: the company is experiencing material RAM cost inflation rather than minor, easily absorbed swings.)

Put those together and you get a brutal procurement reality: when costs move faster than product timelines, teams can end up stuck between two bad options. You can ship the device anyway and risk the upgrade feeling underwhelming, which can damage trust with customers. Or you can cancel or delay, which preserves brand positioning but leaves the roadmap with a hole, potentially slowing momentum with retailers, carriers, and the broader ecosystem that expects regular refresh cycles.

This also helps explain why budget and midrange manufacturers are getting hit so visibly. High-end phones can sometimes hide cost pressure inside larger margins, and premium brands may have more latitude to raise prices without breaking their category promise. But CMF is built around a different contract with buyers: performance that punches above its price. Evangelidis is essentially saying that contract cannot be honored if RAM costs keep rising.

From an executive perspective, the strategic stakes are bigger than one product launch. A cancelled phone is not only lost revenue for this year. It also changes internal planning, including engineering prioritization, supply chain negotiations, marketing schedules, and channel commitments. If you remove a launch from the calendar, you have to reallocate resources to what remains, and you have to manage expectations across stakeholders who may have been planning around that cadence.

There is also a second-order governance angle. In companies where product bets are backed by budgets and timelines, a call like “we can’t build a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense” forces leadership to revisit assumptions about input costs. That can ripple into board-level conversations about inventory strategy, hedging policies, procurement contracts, and how to structure pricing commitments when commodity-like inputs can move sharply.

Finally, this is a signal to peers. When Nothing publicly chooses not to launch a CMF successor, it is telling the market that RAM volatility can become a product-killer, not just a margin story. For other midrange and budget phone makers, the question becomes: how quickly can your supply chain adapt, and how flexible is your roadmap if memory pricing stays elevated? Evangelidis’s decision answers one part of that question in the most concrete way possible: if RAM prices don’t come down, “next year” can effectively turn into “not this year.”