Note that I bought a Pod earlier on and have been upgraded to Pod 4 from warranty due to leak. It was obnoxiously cloud controlled from the start, but originally was much cheaper than now and it included a mattress and there was no mandatory monthly fee to just use the damn thing. I will give them credit that the Pod 4 is quite comfortable, the cooling/heating is nice, and the device is nice and quiet. For the most part the hardware design hits it out of the park, except for their aversion to local controls, which seems mostly driven by their software bullshit.

So first, that hardware control they added isn't exactly awesome. People kept demanding buttons on the base or a remote or something. They smugly declared that modeling the earbud 'tap N times to do an operation' was the "correct" way because remotes are too easy to lose and no one would want to touch the base. Earbuds have to settle for that crap because of lack of surface area to control, your whole ass bed doesn't have to make concessions to crappy hardware UI. So now I have double tap, or triple tap that has different meanings based on context, and even then only if the bed is 'on' which you can only do from the app and it turns itself 'off' automatically, so you can't just 'cheat' and use the local hardware controls because those only are enabled at the behest of their bullshit cloud service.

For the software side, it's trying to force you to go to their servers for no damn reason for the consumer. It will only deign to talk to a smartphone long enough to get connected to their cloud presence, and only toward that function. It also wants to "auto-control" your temperature and will frequently decide it knows better than you how you want the temperature to be and auto-adjust. It general the whole thing reeks of "we are smarter than you, and we will be all weird about all sorts of facets of this thing".

And of course, it shows in their pricing. They got rid of the mattress and raised the price to $3,000 for just the cover and also now mandate a $17/month subscription plan on top of that for new customers (we grandfathered into the old situation, no monthly plan as well as what was a more reasonably priced product).

No way in hell would I buy it as it stands now, but if they at least enabled local control, ditched the monthly payment requirement bullshit and cut the price back, then I would be an unambiguous fan.