Hell my first thought was "SMART BED....is this really a thing?"

I had to double check to make sure it wasn't April 1st.

Seriously, WTF would anyone need a bed hooked to the fucking internet?!?!?

If I'm paying $5000 for a mattress, it had better do a lot more than that.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a situation where any subscription fee for exposing basic controls for the provided hardware would be reasonable. So far, "the bed itself is free", is the only one I can think of.

Fur $5k I expect a robot for sex.

Agreed, if the bed can heat to 110 F then that has the potential to do bodily harm. Seems like they failed to define a safe state for the bed.

I'm no control-systems engineer, but I provide support to those who are in that I work with device access rules and have had to account for BACnet traffic. I won't say that it's always fun doing things locally, but when the HVAC technicians have to go visit sites to try to fix Trane Ensemble controllers it's nice when they don't have to call Trane's support hotline for every stinkin' little thing.

I just wish that they'd call my team when they're swapping them out, when they put the new one up without telli

I'm sure it was built exactly to spec by the offshore development team.

How is this dumb engineering if the product made the company a lot of money?

Even worse, they have a local control loop, but they deliberately cripple it.

If the bed is 'on' (which is only allowed through their cloud connection), then you can locally adjust things fine. However it will refuse to do this if the internet hasn't approved the device to operate locally.

This 'enhancement' was added after people demanded local remote or buttons or *anything*. They implemented an earbud-style tap side of bed N number of times for adjusting temp or dismissing alarm.

So they know precisely what

> As a control systems engineer, putting the control loop through the cloud is absolutely ridiculous. Sure, make it so you can change the setting from your phone, assuming you know how to setup secure communication, but the control loop needs to be local. This is just dumb engineering.

Dumb requirements, really, because an app on your phone and local networks are fine. But likely some sales droid or marketing droid required the ability to control your bed anywhere in the world - like you can be at work and the

Its been engineered deliberately so it won't work without a net connection so they can charge a subscription model and possibly get user sleep data too.

The only dumb bit is on the part of the morons who parted with 4 figure sums to buy this thing from these grifters in the first place.

Also, the failure mode should probably be "bed" and not 110 degrees and upright.

That's why they put MBA's in charge of these things. For them "reliability" means that the revenue keeps rolling in. A minor blip like this costs them a mere press release, and is unlikely to dissuade anyone from buying one or renewing their subscription.

People actually forgot what failsafe means. It's not just contingencies within your code. It's expecting failure, and making sure that any possible failure has a safe result.

Hardware engineer here, we did safety critical components. It was always fun when somebody had to go through all the potential wire break combinations to check if it would not kill or hurt someone.

Sounds like the matress was made by software guys. They used a raspberry pi for the mattress, didn't they?

The code was written toward the purpose of forcing the users into a monthly subscription.

The goal was not to deliver the best user experience. To the extent they have tried to accommodate demands for local control, they have predicated it on having relatively recently been 'blessed' to let the user do that within the last few hours. That takes explicit effort to implement a local control loop and make sure it gets approval.

My wife insisted on it and we bought one when they were getting started and relative

I like this one best: "A distributed system is a system where I cannot get work done because a machine I have never heard of is down." Apparently said by Leslie Lamport ca. 1990. Current s fuck. And people remain stupid.

> Your smart bed knows when you're fucking.

You do realize that you've opened yourself up to a response along the lines of, "then your smart bed has never caught you in the act."

Wow... This thing seems almost as obtrusive as that new smart toilet with a camera under the lid that analyzes your poo for health monitoring. Almost.

So do my neighbors.

My guess is that this started when they sat down in-committee (not a technical committee, mind you) and thought of ways to control their bed without having to spend the money on a full-featured control panel as part of the bed itself. They settled on the smartphone and decided that it thus had to have cloud connectivity, particularly when it was pointed out that if it uses the cloud, then they can charge for the features as a service instead.

> Something like Bluetooth comms with the bed to allow smartphone apps to control the bed sound better suited.

I'd rather just have buttons.

A bluetooth connection can interface with the app, with no need for Cloud. Like others have said, malicious engineering.

Biggest problem is a company like eight sleep has the marketing. So if someone really wants a temperature controlled bed, it's hard to know what a credibly good one is. I *think* Chilipad is a good one, but it's a pretty pricey thing to evaluate and thanks to internet-everything, it's not like you can see for yourself.

But yeah, Eight sleep deserves every amount of bad press they can get for being such a douche company.

It is really fascinating. I am coming around to the insight that the average person literally (!) understands nothing.