Man, reality is way weirder than i thought…
- Invent incredibly dumb device.
- Brand it as “Smart” to lean into Dunning-Kruger effect sales.
- Profit!!
A smart bed that can’t function without checking in with mother ship? That’s the dumbest thing ever. You can always tell the businesses that skipped testing lol.
Its a feature, make the product unusable if its not used as they intend. Take the sim card out of your car and watch it go into limp mode.
good. I hope that whole industry fails. plug in anything is bullshit. give me old fashioned!!!
This is right up there with the Louvre security being connected to the internet and was hackable. Maybe some old fashioned alarms and guards would’ve been better.
Do you seriously think old alarms were unhackable?
Not being able to do it from a distance would probably be a boon to security.
Can’t just unplug them?
Lol
When AWS went down, users lost access to the app that manages its water-cooled coils, leaving them stuck with whatever setting was last active.
That’s ridiculous. The app should merely talk to the device over wifi, if available. The cloud should only be used to connect from outside the wifi network.
Why is everything so crappy?
IoT devs avoid MQTT and Multicast traffic like the plague.
i heard people got locked in, or out of thier house on thier smart"locks", and also ring cameras were affected because the ALARM SOUNDS WOULDNT TURN OFF.
But even that makes little sense as it should take commands locally and any telemetry should be done after the commands are issued. This method basically says “if we ever miss out on telemetry data, it’s just not worth it to us to give you what you already paid for. “
eh perhaps to collect usage data and somehow benefit from it.
anyone who buys a mattress that can’t work without being connected to the internet deserves this
First time I’m hearing of a smart bed… who tf is buying this crap? I still see Teslas out in the open and drives me mad to no end.
NGL if you have the money, a Watercooled bed is amazing.
Getting one that doesn’t work through the internet though, good luck.
I think coding a contingency for loss of internet connectivity has got to be as basic as preventing Little Bobby Tables from deleting your data.
But then you might be able to bypass the €25/mth subscription on your €3059 mattress cover.
This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.
Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.
hahahahahahahaha… this is so stupid!
Wow, I didn’t know freesleep was a thing. I wrote the sleep pod off due to the subscription snd cloud reliance. Looks like someone is working on a Home Assistant integration too! This is definitely something I’m going to follow.
I’m conflicted though, as I really don’t want to give money to a company with such a terrible business model, but they’re the only ones who make this kind of bed.
I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.
FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.
If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.
Oh wow, that looks even better! When I was looking into this about a year or so ago all I could find was the BedJet and it used air instead of water. There was another company but it went out of business, this looks like it might be it?
Do you know if the Chillpad Dock Pro has sleep tracking like the Sleep 8? A big seller for me is that it automatically prevents overheating/being cold, and wakes you up at the right time. The website says this:
Automatic Temperature Adjustments for Optimal Sleep Schedule automated temperature adjustments throughout the night to keep your bed at the perfect temperature for optimal sleep.
That sounds contradictory for it to be both automatic, but also scheduled.
If you don’t own it or don’t know don’t worry, I’ll research it more. I really appreciate you showing me these options!
I just saw that they’re bringing back local controls but I bet it’s going to time out if the service is down for more than X time to refresh your license.
You have upset the shareholders.
You are correct!
But you know what isn’t as easy or basic as that? Convincing Product Managers and others on up the chain that you should be able to take some time to code and test to fix an issue they don’t give a fuck about because it doesn’t affect their metrics.
Hahahah wtf is this world anymore, beds getting fucked up because an internet service broke, this is the stupidest timeline.
Here i am with my primitive bed with zero electronics.
I get that the people who buy this stuff might not know what needing an always-online service to function entails, but what were the designers thinking?
The designers were thinking “we want to force users to a monthly subscription”.
So against my preference, we bought one of these. Years ago and it wasn’t so crazy expensive and the basic ‘cloud’ functionality was free. Over the course of the years of the initially decent warranty, the covers sprang leaks and so we got free upgrades carrying us all the way to a generation of the product where they replaced the crappy molded leak prone water mat with decent tubes that seem to be more resilient, all without needing to get in the subscription. As a consequence, I know about their evolution.
From the onset, they were hammered with “phone over the internet control is bogus, add a remote or buttons on the base or something”, and they kept responding with vague “we are working a solution”. Well, they ultimately did, they added earbud-style 'tap N number of times on the side to adjust things or dismiss alarms". Ok, super awkward and still no buttons, but at least it has local controls, right? Well, I go to try it and it just gives the long-buzz error indication. Turns out the app has to be used to activate the bed or schedule a start time before the local controls will let you control it. When they explicitly added a local control loop, they blocked it from working unless the cloud service said it was ok.
This is not “crappy developer stupidly doesn’t know how to make local control work”. This is “developer going out of their way to screw over a customer to force them to keep paying for every single month they want the product to keep working”.
A shame, aversion to buttons aside, the hardware design is really quite good, quiet and effective and seemingly more leak resistant.
Designers were probably thinking “well this is stupid but it’s what I’m paid to do and I didn’t decide to have a fucking bed be always online”. The execs that made the decision are probably thinking "why didn’t the designers think of this problem and prevent it? We should fire some. "
That assumes the execs didn’t just contract out all the development and neglect to include an offline requirement.
The designers weren’t going to get paid for the extra work so they didn’t do it.
and neglect to include an offline requirement
Oh the innocence. Execs don’t neglect that, they specifically ask for that. This bed doesn’t work without a subscription so offline functionality would lose them money
but what were the designers thinking?
“We need to remind them who’s in charge.”
Bed goes up. AWS goes down.
“Eight Sleep confirmed there’s no offline mode yet, but they’re working on it.”
There’s an offline mode after all. Unplug it!
then they will have to cope of buying a 2000$ “normal” mattress. its the same people that bought 1800$ smart fridge from samsung. last december deal we purchase a normal mattress for less than 120$
And the air bladders have a leak that was usually dealt with by it being plugged in so it deflates and you’re left with a very flat and hard bed.
So? That doesn’t sound as bad as full power heating.
I have a mattress i purchased for $100 of my buddy when he moved out the country. He ordered it online the year before for $400. I can just throw it on the ground and sleep on it no problem when i move. Not sure why a mattress would ever need an Internet connection other than to spy on you
Theoretically what they were offering can be useful. It both heats and cools, so you can leave the house temperature higher or lower to save on energy costs while staying comfy in bed. It has tilting feature which can be nice for reading or watching TV. Also, you’d hope that it would be a comfy bed in general for that price.
Of course this event shows the makers are fools and the concept of a subscription being needed, for an already overpriced bed, to do what a knob could do, is insane.
Or you can get a window unit if you want your bedroom cooler in the summer and a heated blanket for the winter for a fraction of the cost. And once again, neither of those options will spy on you or stop working just because Amazon shit the bed 1000 miles away from where you live. My parents have a high end mattress that tilts but it doesn’t need an Internet connection, and cost half the price of this thing. IoT devices are a luxury tax on people too stupid for all their money.
the people that would by a 2k bed would also buy a 1800 samsung fridge that comes WITH ADS.
Eight Sleep confirmed that while AWS was down, the metrics collection system was still working using internal memory. This means the dead man’s switch is engaged, and any attempt to power it off would violate the terms of service, causing the bed’s very obvious human-sized mousetrap to have its safety disengaged.
it turns into a smei-bear trap for humans.
Reading the comment from the guy about his bed was a sauna all night from the heat. Did he not just think to unplug it? I mean I’ve never seen one of these beds, what happens if you do??
They bought a $2000 bed with a 24/7 internet requirement, how smart do you think they are?
It will have to find power somewhere else.
