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0 pointscthalupa1y ago0 comments

This all has me quite torn.

The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me - I have sleep apnea, as well as an eight sleep + the electronic platform. It automatically changes the elevation of my head based on apnea events, and I see a marked reduction in them when using this feature.

I have a cpap machine that also makes automatic adjustments but I still get noticeably better sleep quality with the eight sleep. I also really enjoy the temperature control, since it saves on HVAC costs vs. climate controlling the whole house. I've not tried an aquarium chiller for this purpose, though I have used one for doing temperature control on a beer fermenter, and I can extrapolate from there that I value the management of the actual eight sleep device vs. managing an aquarium chiller's temp control.

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EvanAnderson1y ago

> The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me...

All of those features could be provided by local compute, either nestled somewhere in the soft and fluffy gross profit margin of a $2,000 product, or with Bluetooth to a "thick" application running on a phone.

The reason this product, and so many other "IoT" products, put their compute across the Internet is to facilitate a business model. The industry has the technology to put as much compute, storage, and reliability on-site with a high-margin, high-cost product like this.

dylan6041y ago

Even if it were a nightstand device rather than a phone. The immediate loss of functionality when loss of signal to the mothership is an egregious design flaw. There's no reason the thing can't have a bit of storage so it can then upload the logged data when the signal returns.

Of course, they'll probably claim AI running in the cloud is making the decisions which makes the local first controller not possible.

gopher_space1y ago

It’s not a design flaw, they created a hardware loss-leader and then couldn’t come up with any useful services you couldn’t write yourself.

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plagiarist1y ago

It would be nice if we could provide medical assistance to people who need it without jamming these devices full of adware garbage and forcing people to connect to the internet to use their own possessions.

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