the yellow earbuds solved a problem i invented

My coworker with the oat latte stared at my ears for a full three seconds and said, "are those a limited edition or a toy?" They are neither, Ryan. They are the Nothing Ear (a) in Yellow, they are the color of a rubber duck, and I have never once lost them in a bag, which is a sentence that means more than it sounds like it does.

Here's the story of the loudest object in my beige life.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part: my main earbuds are the AirPods Pro, which I reviewed here and still use most days. These exist because I wanted a second pair for the gym and for walks, and because I test design decisions for a living and Nothing makes the most interesting design decisions in consumer audio right now. I paid $90 instead of $99.99 during a sale, and the entire purchase was, in the end, a solution to a problem I caused myself by owning eleven black things that live in one black bag.

the six things, ranked by how loud they are

The Yellow is the feature. It comes in Black and White too, and every review notes that the Yellow colorway divides rooms, but the bubble-shaped case in yellow is small, 4.8 grams per bud, and impossible to lose on a desk, in a gym bag, on a park bench, or in the couch cushions where dark earbuds go to retire. The case is lighter than a deck of cards and the whole thing fits in the tiny pocket of gym shorts that exists for keys. For a person whose apartment is a museum of oat-colored objects, one deliberate loud thing is balance. That's my story and I'm keeping it.

The controls are a pinch, and my hands learned them in a day. Squeeze the stem once to pause, twice to skip, hold for noise control, and everything's remappable in the app, which is the kind of thoughtfulness you usually don't get at this price. No tapping, no pressing your earbud into your skull mid-workout, no pausing songs by adjusting the fit. Reviewers called the system intuitive and I co-sign: it's the part I miss most when I switch back to my other buds.

The ANC is good, not magic, and honest about it. There's a Smart ANC mode that checks your seal and adapts, low through high strength settings, plus an adaptive mode that adjusts to whatever noise you're standing in. Lab testing put the peak cancellation around 25dB, which is well short of the flagship earbuds, and my lived version agrees: traffic gets quieter, not gone, and the gym radio fades to a rumor instead of vanishing. For $90 that's not a complaint. It's the correct amount of noise cancelling, accurately labeled.

The battery is quietly excellent. My real number matches the testers: about eight and a half hours per charge, with the case bringing the total to north of forty hours, and 10 minutes on USB-C buys you 10 hours of playback when you're walking out the door in ten minutes, which is always. No wireless charging on the case, which is the one spec cut I notice weekly, and the case itself is only rated IPX2, so it stays home from the beach. The buds are IP54 and I have sweated on them professionally.

The sound is bass-forward and you can fix it in about a minute. Out of the box they lean low, boosted sub-bass with a small dip through the mids, and testers called the default tuning good enough rather than great, which is fair. The three-band equalizer plus a five level Bass Enhance mode in the app reshapes most of it, and on an Android device you also get LDAC for the high quality stream. They're jack-of-all-trades earbuds, exactly as reviewed: nothing they do is the best, nothing they do is bad. For a second pair, that's the whole assignment.

Calls are the surprise hit. The microphones use what Nothing calls Clear Voice Technology and they isolate a voice from a street corner better than buds costing twice as much, which I know because I've taken design reviews from a sidewalk and nobody asked if I was outside. On windy days it's still a coin flip, like every earbud ever made. But for the price, the call quality is the spec I'd brag about first if I were the marketing department.

the one yellow thing tangent

Hear me out on color theory for a second. My whole apartment is a palette: oat, bone, warm gray, one green plant I haven't killed yet. Designers joke about this and I am the joke, fully. So when the yellow buds came home, I expected them to feel like an intruder. Instead they became the point. A room that is all one tone is a waiting room. A room that is all one tone with one loud yellow thing is a room with a personality, which is a thing I tell my clients and apparently needed to relearn through earbuds.

The founder of the brand famously wears a black t-shirt every day and sells transparent gadgets. I used to think that was a contradiction. I now understand it completely: the uniform is calm so the object can shout. My desk is beige so my ears can be a warning sign. Anyway, moving on, before I repaint a wall yellow and have to move out.

the soft landing

If you've been putting off a small treat because it feels silly next to the serious expensive things, this is a small, cheery, honestly good thing, and it fixed a daily annoyance I had stopped noticing, which is the best kind of purchase there is.

I keep meaning to compare these properly against my AirPods Pro in the same week, the gym, the commute, one method, one verdict, and every time I start the test I end up just wearing the yellow ones around the apartment because they match my mood better, which is not a

Rubber duck yellow. Zero losses. One bag I can finally trust.

• ava 🟡