CMF, the budget smartphone brand owned by Nothing, will not be releasing a new phone in 2026. The company’s co-founder came out and said it plainly, pointing to surging memory prices as the reason the brand can’t deliver a meaningful upgrade without breaking its own pricing rules.
“A lot of you have been asking when the next CMF phone is coming and as always we’d rather be transparent,” Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis wrote on X. As reported by Engadget, Evangelidis confirmed that a successor to the Phone Pro 2 is in development, but said current memory prices make it impossible to build a phone that “feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF.”
That’s a candid admission from a brand that has built its reputation on affordable hardware. And it reflects a broader problem hitting the entire consumer electronics industry right now.
RAM prices have climbed sharply over the past year. The main cause is a supply shortage driven by chipmakers shifting production capacity toward AI infrastructure orders. The knock-on effects are showing up everywhere:
- Apple and Samsung have both warned customers that price increases are coming because of higher RAM costs
- The IDC predicted PC shipments could fall by nearly 10 percent this year as prices rise
- Budget device makers are hit hardest, since they have less room to absorb cost increases without pushing prices up
For CMF specifically, the math just doesn’t work. The brand exists to offer competitive specs at accessible prices, mostly targeting buyers in markets like India, where it was recently spun off into an independent subsidiary. Launching a phone that costs significantly more than its predecessor would undercut the entire point of the brand.
The Phone Pro 2, launched in April 2025, was CMF’s latest device. It was the lightest and slimmest phone the brand had made at the time, with a claimed two-day battery life. A few months after launch, Nothing officially separated CMF into a standalone company headquartered in India, its strongest market.
The decision to skip a phone launch this year is notable because CMF had been on a fairly aggressive release schedule since it started in 2023. Pausing that momentum is a real cost, particularly in a competitive budget segment where rivals keep shipping new hardware.
That said, the brand isn’t going quiet. Evangelidis said CMF will still launch several new products this year, including what he described as “some entirely new categories.” He didn’t give specifics, but the hint suggests CMF may be expanding beyond smartphones into other consumer tech areas while it waits for memory prices to stabilize.
The bigger picture here is that the AI spending boom is creating unexpected collateral damage for everyday consumers. When hyperscalers order memory chips by the billions, it squeezes supply for everyone else. Budget phone buyers end up paying the price, even indirectly, through delayed products or higher costs when devices do arrive.