CMF Clip Pro review: Nothing's budget sub-brand nails open-ear comfort at $79
CMF by Nothing's first open-ear earbuds, the Clip Pro, launched at $99 and within days dropped to a $79 sale price, the same window in which The Verge published its review concluding that the earbuds handle the inherent compromises of clip-style design well while staying under $100 (The Verge).
CMF is Nothing's budget sub-brand. The Clip Pro is its first open-ear earbud pair, marketed by Nothing as an open-wear earphone (Nothing). The $99 launch price matched that of Nothing's own Ear (3a) earbuds, positioning the Clip Pro as a parallel option rather than a strict tier below in cost. The swift discount to $79 narrows that gap further.
The design uses a 3-point clip configuration. Instead of sitting inside the ear canal, the speaker sits just outside it, with a flexible band wrapping around the ear to hold the earbud secure (The Verge). The band avoids pinching around the helix, and the reviewer reported no discomfort from either the speaker orb or the battery and control capsule. That comfort outcome matters for clip-style buds, where pressure on ear cartilage is the most common failure mode.
On the hardware side, the Clip Pro runs a 10.8mm audio driver and supports LDAC, AAC, and SBC codecs (The Verge). Nothing lists a Clear Voice Chip for call quality and claims up to 10 hours of playback on a single charge, with 32.5 hours total including the case (The Verge; Nothing). The earbuds also support fixed spatial audio and high-res audio over LDAC.
The charging case includes a physical dial that controls volume and functions as a button for play/pause, track skipping, or summoning the phone's assistant (The Verge). The dial lacked sufficient resistance in testing, causing accidental adjustments when the case was in a pocket. That is the kind of small hardware oversight that can erode daily-use satisfaction more than any spec sheet shortfall.
Software features live in the Nothing X app. A three-band EQ is available but behaves counterintuitively: raising a slider can lower other frequencies rather than boosting the target band. An anti-leakage mode, also in the app, cuts higher frequencies to reduce sound bleed from the open-ear design, but it adversely affects overall sound quality (The Verge).
The EQ and anti-leakage tradeoffs are worth flagging. Open-ear designs inherently sacrifice isolation and bass response compared to in-ear canal buds, and the tools meant to compensate for those gaps here come with their own costs. The anti-leakage mode in particular asks the user to choose between privacy and fidelity, and the EQ's interaction behavior means fine-tuning a preferred sound signature requires more trial and error than a standard graphic EQ. For a sub-$100 product these are forgivable compromises, but they do define the practical ceiling of what the Clip Pro can deliver for an audio-focused user.
The broader context is that open-ear and clip-style buds have proliferated in 2025 and 2026 as an alternative to canal-sealing designs, driven by users who find in-ear tips uncomfortable or want situational awareness. The category's challenge has always been delivering acceptable sound quality without a sealed acoustic chamber. Nothing's approach with the Clip Pro, combining a 10.8mm driver and LDAC support in a comfortable clip form factor at a competitive price, addresses enough of that challenge to earn The Verge's positive verdict while leaving clear room for refinement in the software experience and case hardware.
At $79 on sale, the Clip Pro undercuts most name-brand open-ear alternatives by a meaningful margin while offering codec support and feature depth that budget entries typically omit. The dial-on-case concept is genuinely useful in principle, and the comfort result is the strongest argument for the product. The software quirks and case resistance issue are the obvious targets for an iterative revision, and given Nothing's track record of shipping hardware refinements across product generations, a follow-up that tightens those loose ends is a reasonable expectation rather than a speculative one.
