I’m solely half joking after I say that Eight Sleep’s temperature-controlling mattress cowl improved my marriage. A superb night time’s sleep is elusive in my home. I’m all the time chilly, my partner runs sizzling. We battle nightly over the thermostat. So after I first reviewed an Eight Sleep cowl, it was a revelation. I may curl up and drift off right into a toasty slumber. My partner may make like a penguin and sleep on a slab of ice.
The solely factor I didn’t like was the practically $1,900 value and the $19 month-to-month subscription. Fast-forward two years, and alas, I’m in the identical pickle with Eight Sleep’s newest ludicrously costly mattress cowl: the Pod 4 Ultra, which begins at just below $4,700 for a Queen. Not together with the obligatory annual membership, which begins at $199.
I can hear my mother’s ghost screeching. $4,700!? Are you insane?! Sleep is free! It’s a good criticism, however good sleep is difficult to come back by. Eight Sleep’s entire pitch is that it helps create the proper sleep situations. The cowl comprises tubing that runs water from a management hub to individually heat or cool either side of the mattress. It’s embedded with sleep-tracking sensors, plus haptic motors for a silent alarm, letting the mattress vibrate at a steadily rising depth to softly wake you up. Lastly, there’s an AI-powered Autopilot characteristic that adjusts the temperature as you sleep so that you theoretically get a greater night time’s relaxation. Since it’s a canopy, you possibly can zip it onto your current mattress as a substitute of getting to shell out for a whole good mattress. (Those can value as much as a whopping $10,000.)
The newest Pod 4 Ultra does all of that, too — and it’s fairly good at it. So why is it a lot costlier? Some of that’s good ole value inflation, however the Ultra bundle additionally provides a base. It slots into your current mattress body and allows you to regulate the mattress’s elevation and place. The cowl itself has additionally been refined so it’s quieter, 20 p.c thinner, and has twice the cooling energy. Sleep monitoring now contains loud night breathing detection — and in case you shell out for the bottom, the mattress routinely lifts the pinnacle space to cut back mentioned loud night breathing. Eight Sleep additionally added contact controls by way of two “faucet zones” on both aspect of the mattress that allow you to regulate temperature, dismiss alarms, and regulate mattress place while not having your telephone.
It pains my penny-pinching soul that I really like these updates.
Hear me out. I do know nobody wants a flowery $2,000 base to tweak their mattress’s elevation. In my 36 years on Earth, stacking a bunch of pillows in opposition to the headboard has typically been adequate. But the mattress elevating for you is regretfully pleasant. On lazy Sundays, I hit the studying elevation preset and morph into a contented little shrimp whereas watching the most recent brain-rotting season of Love is Blind. Cozying up with a e book, ft and higher again elevated with my mattress already warmed up for me is now my nightly routine. (It’s additionally the comfiest method to doomscroll.) There are two different presets for enjoyable and sleeping, and you may set your individual customized elevation, too.
Having the bottom additionally will get you a nifty loud night breathing mitigation characteristic. When enabled, the mattress will routinely elevate when it detects loud night breathing. It’s not good. I’ve woken up just a few instances to a shifting mattress. Even so, I’d relatively be barely disoriented by a shifting mattress than need to grumpily get up my loud night breathing partner to get them to settle down. Especially since I haven’t woken up each time. Sometimes I solely know an adjustment occurs as a result of it pops up in Eight Sleep’s morning sleep report. Either manner, I now have definitive proof that I snore a lot, a lot lower than my partner.
The major draw back — in addition to the fee — is the bottom isn’t excellent when you’ve got small wily pets. My cat Petey by no means seen the mattress as a foe earlier than, however now that it strikes, it’s turn out to be public enemy primary. It strikes, he pounces, claws unsheathed. I’m afraid certainly one of nowadays, he’s going to poke a gap within the Pod 4 Ultra — a tool filled with water at any given second. Cats additionally love exploring underneath the mattress, which led to an incident the place he nearly acquired pancaked by the mattress decreasing. It’s now a household rule that every one cats should be accounted for earlier than altering mattress elevation.
I requested Eight Sleep concerning the seeming lack of security options. “We don’t have any reported instances of individuals or small pets being harmed by the Pod 4 Ultra Base,” says Sam Kang, Eight Sleep’s VP of {hardware}. “We additionally transfer the bottom very slowly to permit time for something that could be beneath the decreasing portion to get out of the way in which.” I nonetheless say you should be overly cautious, particularly as there aren’t any warnings throughout the app.
Bed elevation is cool, however the improve I really like most is the contact controls. The faucet zones, positioned on both aspect of the mattress, are textured so you possibly can simply really feel them by the sheets. Double tapping raises the mattress temperature, whereas triple tapping lowers it. A quadruple faucet will allow you to cycle by mattress elevation presets (e.g., studying, rest, sleeping, and so on.). But it’s most useful in snoozing or dismissing the silent alarm. Mine vibrates my aspect of the mattress at 5:45AM so I can prepare for my cursed morning exercise. All I’ve to do is roll over, pat the mattress twice, and I don’t disturb my partner. Previously, I’d need to blindly seek for my telephone, launch the Eight Sleep app, and dismiss the alarm that manner. I used to be by no means fast sufficient, and the “silent” alarm is definitely fairly loud the longer you let it go. (The vibrations are fairly highly effective.) Adding the contact controls lets me use the silent alarm extra confidently — and lets my partner get some additional Zzzs.
The different updates are much less flashy however enhance the general expertise. The hub, for example, is unquestionably quieter. With the Pod 2 Pro, it will often whirr whereas filling the mattress with water. It wasn’t too noisy, however it was loud sufficient that my partner would remark. We don’t actually discover the Pod 4’s hub, besides when it’s time to refill the tank. It’s nonetheless sort of huge — concerning the measurement of a slim gaming PC, however after a whilst you overlook it’s there. The cowl itself appears to be like the identical, however it’s now thinner and has redesigned tubing for higher consolation and environment friendly cooling. I assume I observed after we first used the Pod 4 Ultra, however it’s not one thing that made an enormous general affect. It’s onerous to say whether or not the cooling can also be two instances extra highly effective, although I do really feel prefer it’s ever so barely quicker at reaching the specified temperature.
Expensive mattress tech is inherently ridiculous. A mattress has one job: to be a snug place so that you can sleep. Adding tech to it overcomplicates one of the crucial pure issues a human can do. But that is the age of optimization, and wellness influencers would have you ever imagine that none of us sleep in addition to we must always. (Though, you may simply repair this by shopping for a complement or product utilizing a code of their bio. How else may mouth taping take over TikTookay?) That sleepmaxxing has turn out to be a viral development speaks to how a lot the common individual desires to sleep higher. In this surroundings, a $5,000 good mattress cowl — not even a mattress — that guarantees you the perfect night time of totally optimized, AI-automated sleep is the most 2024 piece of wellness tech possible. It drives me bonkers that I can’t even argue with the outcomes! Yes, it may be finicky at first, and it took months to actually discover how a lot my sleep had improved. But the very fact is my partner and I, each lifelong insomniacs, have been sleeping like infants.
The final time I believed this tough a couple of mattress was in my early 20s. After seven years of sleeping on paper-thin, rock-hard futons, I’d accrued sufficient bodily pains that my physician demanded I purchase a correct mattress. Almost in a single day, the ache that had been plaguing me for years disappeared. No one is extra upset than I that switching from a daily mattress to an Eight Sleep product had comparable, albeit much less dramatic, outcomes. Not as soon as, however twice.
Even so, I nonetheless battle with this price ticket. Particularly since options like Autopilot, silent alarms, and sleep insights, are locked behind a compulsory $199 annual subscription that you simply pay for upfront. You can cancel after a 12 months, as long as you’re okay with dropping each single characteristic besides guide temperature management. Eight Sleep says it does this to develop, keep, and enhance its good options, however subscribing to your mattress essentially feels incorrect. Adjusting the temperature is crucial characteristic, however it’s not definitely worth the entry value if that’s all you’re getting.
And but, I stay tempted. It’s why I hate that I really like this mattress. On the one hand, it’s frequently solved a serious drawback my partner and I’ve with our sleep preferences. On the opposite, we nonetheless managed to sleep on a daily, not-so-smart mattress previously and will achieve this once more. Even if we’d have to return to battling over the thermostat. It’d be so a lot simpler to make this determination if the Pod 4 Ultra sucked. But it doesn’t! Now my drawback is determining how a lot night time’s sleep is basically price.
