When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.
It doesn’t need one. Sleep Eight decided to make it that way.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble with sleep lately, and it’s really impacting my work and life. Apart from working with my Dr I was seriously considering ponying up the big bucks for a Sleep Eight until I found that literally all of it’s features rely on the cloud, and a monthly subscription, for no legitimate reason whatsoever.
Look, I’m for subscriptions when they make sense. Have a service that requires a lot of infrastructure? Subscription. Something that needs continuous dev work? Subscription. All I ask is that the subscription be kept low so that it’s affordable and everyone can be happy. But that’s not how it goes. Two things end up happening:
They price the subscriptions at $10-15+ per month making it quite a large expense in aggregate. They’re not being priced the fair cost of maintenance or development, they’re being priced to make even more money.
The device doesn’t need cloud infrastructure at all, they just chose to do it that way to retain control and keep you dependant.
Both are what’s happening with the Sleep Eight. You literally can’t use any of the sleep detection features (things that run locally on a cheap smart band from 10 years ago) without the cloud. Its insane. There is no good reason that couldn’t be done on device.
I refused to buy it because of their business model, but they’re really the only game in town for this kind of product. They seem to be getting away with it, so I guess fuck me.
What kind of subscriptions require large infrastructure?
Music/media/cloudstorage can all run on a single pc/server costing maybe half a day of setting it up by most people at the level of having switched to Linux.
Acces to a big multiplayer game server is the only one that really comes go mind.
If it’s just for a few people there is very little need for maintenance, rarely any developer work.
My jellyfin can stream 4K just fine, even remotely through a vpn so i am not sure what you mean.
Depending on transcoding you might require a gpu but still not a standard “gaming spec” pc cant handle.
Come to think of it, my internet provider does allow upload up to 25mb/s and this is the highest end available for consumers in my area. Technically thats a subscription but realistically its bill similar to water/electricity.
The upload limit is also purely and artificial cap, they could easily quadruple it if they wanted.
Also Realistically usecase for 4k movies is usually your home couch so it be streamed on Lan speed. Quality is often better than common stream providers because they do cheat to keep bandwidth down.
This isn’t meant as a slight, but I take it you don’t work in IT. You are way underestimating what it takes to run a service at the scale these large companies do. Homelabbing is cool and a great way to get off these providers, but we as individuals have completely different requirements. A proper cloud service is incredibly complex with multiple environments, rigid change controls, global availability, zero allowable downtime, etc. You can’t just wing it with a few desktops.
Must be different requirements indeed. But yours don’t sound like typical consumer requirements. Why do we need the same scale as a large corporation?
I can respect the corporate ability to serve thousands at a time but a typical household simply doesn’t need that.
Me and a few of my friends all work in IT and each have a dedicated proxmox machine that runs all of these things just fine. Nextcloud has so far only failed me once when i needed it and it was actually a cloudflare issue and still worked locally.
Navidrome i use all day every day and need accessible from anywhere. I have not updated or checked the container since setup and it has been stable as a rock. Fuck spotify which doesn’t have the bootlegs i listen to anyway.
The endgoal, which i archived is that i have no need for subscriptions and actually own my data which is the point right?
My actual hobbyist goal is to create something that can persist locally if the internet one day disappears.
Why the fuck does a bed need a subscription, and why the fuck does it need to be cloud based.
Fuck that garbage, for the price just buy a fuckin used hospital bed.
It doesn’t need one. Sleep Eight decided to make it that way.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble with sleep lately, and it’s really impacting my work and life. Apart from working with my Dr I was seriously considering ponying up the big bucks for a Sleep Eight until I found that literally all of it’s features rely on the cloud, and a monthly subscription, for no legitimate reason whatsoever.
Look, I’m for subscriptions when they make sense. Have a service that requires a lot of infrastructure? Subscription. Something that needs continuous dev work? Subscription. All I ask is that the subscription be kept low so that it’s affordable and everyone can be happy. But that’s not how it goes. Two things end up happening:
Both are what’s happening with the Sleep Eight. You literally can’t use any of the sleep detection features (things that run locally on a cheap smart band from 10 years ago) without the cloud. Its insane. There is no good reason that couldn’t be done on device.
I refused to buy it because of their business model, but they’re really the only game in town for this kind of product. They seem to be getting away with it, so I guess fuck me.
What kind of subscriptions require large infrastructure?
Music/media/cloudstorage can all run on a single pc/server costing maybe half a day of setting it up by most people at the level of having switched to Linux.
Acces to a big multiplayer game server is the only one that really comes go mind.
If it’s just for a few people there is very little need for maintenance, rarely any developer work.
I think 4K media streaming does need a fair bit of infrastructure management.
My jellyfin can stream 4K just fine, even remotely through a vpn so i am not sure what you mean.
Depending on transcoding you might require a gpu but still not a standard “gaming spec” pc cant handle.
Come to think of it, my internet provider does allow upload up to 25mb/s and this is the highest end available for consumers in my area. Technically thats a subscription but realistically its bill similar to water/electricity.
The upload limit is also purely and artificial cap, they could easily quadruple it if they wanted.
Also Realistically usecase for 4k movies is usually your home couch so it be streamed on Lan speed. Quality is often better than common stream providers because they do cheat to keep bandwidth down.
This isn’t meant as a slight, but I take it you don’t work in IT. You are way underestimating what it takes to run a service at the scale these large companies do. Homelabbing is cool and a great way to get off these providers, but we as individuals have completely different requirements. A proper cloud service is incredibly complex with multiple environments, rigid change controls, global availability, zero allowable downtime, etc. You can’t just wing it with a few desktops.
Must be different requirements indeed. But yours don’t sound like typical consumer requirements. Why do we need the same scale as a large corporation?
I can respect the corporate ability to serve thousands at a time but a typical household simply doesn’t need that.
Me and a few of my friends all work in IT and each have a dedicated proxmox machine that runs all of these things just fine. Nextcloud has so far only failed me once when i needed it and it was actually a cloudflare issue and still worked locally.
Navidrome i use all day every day and need accessible from anywhere. I have not updated or checked the container since setup and it has been stable as a rock. Fuck spotify which doesn’t have the bootlegs i listen to anyway.
The endgoal, which i archived is that i have no need for subscriptions and actually own my data which is the point right?
My actual hobbyist goal is to create something that can persist locally if the internet one day disappears.
The more features something has the more there is to go wrong.
I am also immediately suspicious of any mundane item or appliance that wants internet access.