My god, this is just hilarious. Remember, kids: If a piece of furniture that has been basically agreed upon for thousands of years (with some changes) needs a cloud connection:
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You’re paying too much.
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You’ll continue paying too much.
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You might wake up sweating in an uncomfortable position.
This week’s Amazon Web Services outage had some people waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
A Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affected AWS cloud hosting, resulting in an outage that impacted more than 1,000 web-based products and services and millions of people.
Perhaps one of the most avoidable breakdowns came via people’s beds. The reliance on the Internet for smart bed products from Eight Sleep resulted in people being awoken by beds locked into inclined positions and sweltering temperatures.
As spotted by Dexerto, the AWS outage caused smart mattress covers from Eight Sleep to malfunction. These “Pod” mattress covers connect to a physical hub, and users can set the covers to temperatures between 55° and 110° Fahrenheit via a companion app. Eight Sleep also sells smart mattress bases that let people control their bed’s elevation with the app. As of this writing, the Pods’ MSRPs range from $2,449 to $3,249, and the base has a $1,950 MSRP. Eight Sleep also sells its Autopilot feature through an annual subscription that starts at $199. Autopilot is supposed to help automatically set Eight Sleep devices to users’ optimal sleeping conditions. Pod purchases require a one-year subscription to Autopilot.
There’s admittedly a bit of Schadenfreude here. You seriously subscribed to a fucking bed?
Most Zigbee devices are locked into working with proprietary gateways to the cloud. The last leg of connection being not-wifi doesn’t change that.
Matter seems like a step in a somewhat good direction for establishing open standards so devices from different vendors can be combined and more importantly, controlled from a hub of user’s choice.