Pod 4 - Experience after 1.5 years
Just sharing my experience of owning Pod 4 for 1.5yrs
purchased with base was around ~$4,000 or so retail but disclaimer - I got a discount from a friend that was an employee
for first 2 months or so worked great - then exponential decline
Ill start with a highlight:
- core feature - temperature is still good - it works and cools / warms me - don't really have any issues here from a hardware perspective
That's really the only highlight - baseline product still works after a year - I guess the bar is pretty low
Lowlights:
- sleep tracking / sensors increasingly got less and less accurate - entirely inaccurate now - by the time I hit a year I never even looked at my sleep score because every night it says I sleep 1-2 hrs and got a 20-50 sleep score lol
- presence detection - honestly this never really worked well for me - pod often stays on way after I get up - and if my partner is away and we don't explicitly tell it - then it will still record sleep for them?? is it just making it up lol ? either that or their ai / sensor hardware is very bad (honestly probably both)
- autopilot is entirely useless and often annoying - most nights when im in bed it'll either decide to randomly change my schedule and start heating me to +5 before sleep or cooling etc - never once have I had it do that and I need to always change it manually back
- autopilot schedule is unpredictable - my sleep schedule is normal - but since presence / sensors are so bad - it regularly doesn't notice I feel asleep and so my later phases never trigger - would be so much better if it stopped trying to be "smart" and just let me set exact times to phases
- App is shit (iOS) - they just keep adding nonsense "features" and UI - I never use the new "AI" tab (its useless - controls are tiny and not often in the same spot) - but app always resets me to this tab - so I open and want to change temperature I have like 6 taps in the middle of the night instead of 1
- App is super slow to open very often - many times screen is entirely black for up to 60 seconds - and then they have that stupid eight sleep logo - like this is an app from 2009 - this is literally against app HIG what are they doing?
Overall:
- if you only care about heating / cooling it works well but way overpriced for that feature set and the subscription is definitely not worth it
- clearly from the app dark patterns (trying to have me compete against partner?), refusing to add basic features, locking basic stuff behind subscription - yeah this company has me pretty turned off and when this fully dies or I want to upgrade I will switch to a competitor
- they claim to have the best sleep tracking because of number of sensors they have - well from what ive seen its pretty terrible - even when it worked "well" in first month or so it wasn't super accurate compared to my Apple Watch or partners Oura ring
I also know some eng that have worked there and from what they've said - none of this is suprising
- the CEO has no taste and micromanages everything but gives no suggestions or actionable feedback just stuff like "I don't like this" lol
- the software Engineering Manager is just a "yes-man" who makes everyone else's lives miserable to make himself look good to the CEO
- CTO ive heard seems fine but only works on hardware
- CEO claims that "recruiting the right people" is what they need to be successful but the app team (and other software teams) have had very high churn because of terrible leadership
seems like CEO (Matteo) has some serious issues he needs to take a look in the mirror and who he surrounds himself with
honestly excited to see the competitors pop up in the space - and hope it will bring some true innovation over this - if you are looking for basic heating / cooling and can either get a huge discount or have cash to burn maybe worth it - otherwise id wait and try one of the competitors coming out