Microblog Memes

HOLD ON IS THIS NOT SATIRE!? I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY

I thought this was a writing prompt for some future dystopian hell but, no, turns out it's our current dystopian hell.

Note that I bought a Pod earlier on and have been upgraded to Pod 4 from warranty due to leak. It was obnoxiously cloud controlled from the start, but originally was much cheaper than now and it included a mattress and there was no mandatory monthly fee to just use the damn thing. I will give them credit that the Pod 4 is quite comfortable, the cooling/heating is nice, and the device is nice and quiet. For the most part the hardware design hits it out of the park, except for their aversion to local controls, which seems mostly driven by their software bullshit.

So first, that hardware control they added isn't exactly awesome. People kept demanding buttons on the base or a remote or something. They smugly declared that modeling the earbud 'tap N times to do an operation' was the "correct" way because remotes are too easy to lose and no one would want to touch the base. Earbuds have to settle for that crap because of lack of surface area to control, your whole ass bed doesn't have to make concessions to crappy hardware UI. So now I have double tap, or triple tap that has different meanings based on context, and even then only if the bed is 'on' which you can only do from the app and it turns itself 'off' automatically, so you can't just 'cheat' and use the local hardware controls because those only are enabled at the behest of their bullshit cloud service.

For the software side, it's trying to force you to go to their servers for no damn reason for the consumer. It will only deign to talk to a smartphone long enough to get connected to their cloud presence, and only toward that function. It also wants to "auto-control" your temperature and will frequently decide it knows better than you how you want the temperature to be and auto-adjust. It general the whole thing reeks of "we are smarter than you, and we will be all weird about all sorts of facets of this thing".

And of course, it shows in their pricing. They got rid of the mattress and raised the price to $3,000 for just the cover and also now mandate a $17/month subscription plan on top of that for new customers (we grandfathered into the old situation, no monthly plan as well as what was a more reasonably priced product).

No way in hell would I buy it as it stands now, but if they at least enabled local control, ditched the monthly payment requirement bullshit and cut the price back, then I would be an unambiguous fan.

That's not a smart bed, that's an internet-connected revenue-extractor.

I initially thought this was a satire comment, on a satire product.

The fact it is real makes something feel fundamentally wrong with the world.

rule of thumb, "will this work without internet?"

because

a: sometimes WiFi is spotty in some places around there house

b: it means they need a server, and who knows how reliable their server is

c: if they go out of business the product you bought is now garbage

d: privacy concerns

e: who knows when they decide to go for a subscription based model and charge you again for what you bought, or to access the features you want

If you have an internet connected bed you deserve to sleep cold

You made your bed, now lie in it.

...just buy a normal bed, idiot

a physical knob vs "state-of-the-art" AI

Look at this dumb asshole that got the $2500-2600 (assuming queen mattress) plus $17/mo or 199/yr subscription mattress cover (eg not the actual fucking mattress or bed frame). What a broke piece of shit. Should’ve gotten the $2850-2950 pod 6

After briefly googling what this actually is and the costs involved I have 0 sympathy for anyone involved. This is 100% tech bro bullshit. A temperature controlled bed sounds neat, I guess, and I am always a sucker for analytics, but this is possibly the most consumer hostile bullshit I have ever seen. It is all of the worst practices of modern tech wrapped into a device:

Grossly overpriced? Check

$350 upsell for physical controls? Check

Tons of vague language about health benefits that extrapolate valid claims onto their product, suggesting their product has benefits beyond something far cheaper (eg temperature does impact sleep but a $10 fan or $150 window unit would likely be fine because research is generally about environment and not about the surface of the bed)? Zero research about the device itself and zero funding for them to get this product investigated? Check

Subscription required? Not technically, core functionality still works, but you lose all the analytics, all the “smart adjustments” of temperature (it basically will just hold a constant temperature throughout the night whereas the subscription will adjust it gradually based on movement) and the biggest point is that your warranty is voided and you lose all support if you don’t maintain a subscription

Also while I don’t know this for sure I am betting there is 0 chance that you can fix this thing if it breaks.

This thing is so dumb and if you buy it I will judge you. You could buy a 2001 Honda accord LX with 141,000 miles. for that price. That’s a reliable car. I had one and drove it to 200k, sold it and I’m sure it ran for a while longer. Maintain it well and you’ll get 250-300k out of that bad boy. Meanwhile your dumb water bed cover will break and leak all over which is apparently so bad people all worry about all the posts theyve seen about leaking and the social media team has to come share blog post about how they make them less shitty now. sorry if you got the first batch, i guess. But it’s okay because as dumb redditors point out you can give them another $500 to extend the warranty to 5 years. Just remember to keep that subscription active or that warranty is void you stupid piece of shit.

you still need a fucking mattress! You know someone buying this isn’t throwing it on a $400 ikea mattress. They’re going for the $3200 foam mattress. I am so mad about this

Edit: it also sells the biometric data its harvests about you to advertisers. Reddit posts show it uploads anywhere from 10-30gb of data per month, so it’s collecting quite a bit of data

Correct, this could be used in the dystopian scifi genre.

To re-enable the Eight Sleep app, please drink verification can

That's a stupid product. Also, can't stand this guy. He's extremely obnoxious, shills cloud services, and seems to give opinions about things way out of his expertise.

I want a bed that can cool itself. That sounds awesome. But make it work "stupidly" instead of being "smart."

Unplug it, you techbro-adjacent dumb bitch

https://www.eightsleep.com/product/pod-cover/

It's real. I was legitimately expecting to feel foolish for believing it.

There's one born every minute.

AI controlled bed

Looks inside: A bunch of ifs