Far more than c/mildlyinfuriating
You must log in or register to comment.
And you need to buy a subscription or watch an ad before you can flush.
Only for a year or so. Then you’ll need premium+ to skip ads. The free tier is also downgraded to 1 flush per day.
Worse: the company decides to cancel the service and no longer support these toilets. You have to purchase a new toilet to continue service.
But the existing mounting hardware is proprietary, so in addition to a new toilet, you also need to replace half your plumbing.
At first I thought that this would be a great opportunity to pit the water companies who own water meters against the smart-toilet companies who accidentally reduce water usage, eating into water company profits, but then I realised that that battle would inevitably result in them working together to make smart toilets that full flush every 30 minutes unless expressly told not to.
I have the own where I give the app camera access and take a picture of my poop and it calculates the proper flush volume.
And you just know they’re sending copies of all your poop data to China, too, for some reason. Probably something to do with “improving targeted advertising,” but we know better.
And you fecal data is shared with health insurance companies, so you can get personalized
price hikesrecommendationsYou gotta give it biometrics. For your fingerprint, WHAT IF SOMBODY BROKE INTO YOUR HOUSE AND SHAT ON YOUR TOILET!!! We need to verify its you! see there keeping you safe from those shitty bastards!! So just uhh give us all permissions
If your wondering there will be a preroll ad for the app and every 20minutes it will turn off your lights to your bathroom. And prompt you on your cellular device “are you still shitting?” And recommend poo docters in your local area using target ads
I wish I was kidding when I say there exist asshole recognition tech already. They’ll just attach that to your advertiser ID so their worldwide network of ‘smart toilets’ can deliver targeted ads to every stall and urinal you visit.
0-0
The fuck
So, if I let a guest shat on my toilet, I have to join and gave my fingerprint permission to flush their shit? Nice.
If an ad starts, the ultimate arkward silence will be better. “Oh look it’s an ad for Iron-meds, your shit looks like you need them.”
More pixels
An app full of spyware and you still need to allow it to access your gallery, precise location, contacts, microphone,camera
And when the company starts struggling, they’ll start charging or requiring you to watch an ad to flush.
Before they go out of business and brick your toilet.
Big whoop I brick my toilet at least once a day 😎
you jest but I recently bought a stove that breaks some UX functions unless you use their fucking app.
I refuse to. fuck em. it does 100% of what I need but that extra 15% would have made it the best ever.
now it gets 2 stars and a bad review for paywalled features.
How sophisticated can a stove be it needs an app?
Also, how did you not catch that before buying?
I wouldn’t even have thought to look. So unless it was prominent in the description, I wouldn’t notice.
Unfortunately, you always have to look now.
And give it a few years and you’ll always have to look for “AI” too. We really are approaching Red Dwarf Talky Toaster territory.
I have a stove with optional app support, but I tolerate it because the app doesn’t add anything. The local controls can do everything. If you use the app, you have to hit a button on the local controls anyway to confirm you are physically there anyway before it listens to the app for most things.
The only thing that was somewhat convenient was phone notification when timed cooking was done, because the stoves own chime wasn’t that loud. However ultimately I stopped bothering and just set a phone timer when I set cook timer, because keeping the oven on the network was an active maintenance activity that wasn’t worth it.
there’s imperfections in the UI on the stove. like for example there’s no number pad. just up and down arrows. this means I can’t input a timer for 17 minutes, I can go to 15 or 20.
others features like using the air fry broiler will only work with the app, but the regular broil setting works fine. the difference is the fan runs 100% of the time on air fry mode vs intermittently on regular convection mode.
designed inconveniences are the rage for product development now.
You have already flushed 3 times today. Wait 22 hours, or upgrade to FlushApp premium to enjoy unlimited flushing experience.
Upgrade to premium+ for AI features
“I have analyzed your fecal output and determined that you consumed an excessive amount of beer and hot wings within the last 36 hours.”
Smash cut to every device in the house showing beer and wing ads for 2 weeks
Upgrade to FlushApp Premium Super Plus to remove advertisements prior to flushing.
And when the company stops wanting to pay the webservice hosting costs, you have to pay the plumber to come back and throw your useless toilet in the trash.
Worked for a company that made a kitchen appliance that had zero buttons. Needed an app. If you unplugged it without shutting it down in the app, it’d send you an alert notification. The app took at least three taps to fucking turn it off.
And the company was paying something like $1MM/yr to AWS to keep this thing running.
slap some AI on that mf
I just thought of a brand new completely different and revolutionary product. A toilet that flushes automatically when you get off the toilet using my patented technology Aii, Artificial Intelligence Infared. I’ll call it the iToilet AI^2. I’m going to be rich.
Our toilets should be smart enough to take a gulp when their mouth is full
Brb, gonna go bleach my eyes
Fun tip, you can dump a bucket of water to flush the toilet. Useful if you’re ever working on your water supply after taco night.
No the Flushmate Throne Pro would definitely not have an S bend, it would have a proprietary in-house designed mascerator pump.
I have made the shit demons mad, what the fuck do I do now?!
“there’s an APP for THAT!”
(wow is that dystopian.)
Ok, sure, why not, but wait, hear me out:
A.I.-powered toilet, on the blockchain, and call it Shitcoin!CrypooCoin
My last ISP demanded I use an Eero router that had no web interface, it was only accesible via an app.
My grandma has a mesh wifi thing provided by her ISP and I couldn’t find a web interface on it either. I wonder if that’s why.
Ours is only accessible via the ISPs app, and is only manageable online.
Once that frustrates me greatly is eight sleep. My wife had been trying various products and unfortunately eight sleep was the best executed one. But they are openly hostile to local controls.
From the time they have released people have been complaining over and over about zero local controls, suggesting buttons on the base, a remote, or even local wifi or Bluetooth controls and their people keep coming online and patronizing by claiming their engineers are working on it, but it’s hard. Truth is they are passing a fucking subscription plan to use your damn bed.
Finally they came out with their local control “solution”. No, buttons should not be on the base, that would be inconvenient. No, a remote control would be too easy to lose. So they implemented super dodgy earbud type controls, two taps for a tick colder, three taps for a tick warmer. Ok, janky as hell, but finally, local controls. So you get things going and do the tap and long buzz meaning “reject” the request. Turns out the taps will only process if the cloud server says it’s ok, and the bed will usually be “off” and not receptive to taps unless you turn it on via Internet app or you have an Internet arranged schedule that has it on at the time you want to adjust it.
It’s a shame since they otherwise had fantastic execution, but their monetization through an app strategy is maddening. So my home has one cloud based device and it pisses me off.
Now I want to take an eight sleep apart and see if I can lobotomize it…
What a world when you have to mod chip your bed.
Stupidly enough, if you read their warranty policy, they got around the fact that it’s not legal for a warranty company to remove a warranty for modding the equipment, by forcing you to have a subscription in order to use the warranty. Their website states
The Pod is a product designed to be slept on every night – and designed to last. We stand behind our product with a 2-year limited warranty, meaning if you have any issues or problems, our team will replace your Pod device as long as you purchased directly through Eight Sleep and have an active membership.
Since this membership is the same thing that is connected to controlling the bed through the app from what I understand, it sounds like even if you did mod it you would still be stuck with that remote solution due to the fact that if you canceled your subscription you wouldn’t have a warranty, inviting a warranty on a at minimum $2,500 bed is just no bueno
This is definitely a device that I would be putting my States warranty law into effect, because this sort of shit ain’t legal in my state
It’s gotta be what, a thermostat, a peristaltic pump and a heater/heat exchanger? Replace the brains with an arduino or a pi and a couple of relays.
I’ve never heard of eight sleep and I went to their web site, and immediately the site is super fucking annoying
my opinion, I would have returned it for that reason. Having a bed that doesn’t work if I lose power or have an internet outage is a hard no for me. Especially concidering the price range a lot of those start at 2k+ USD. The lack of an ability to use it without an app is a deal breaker, the lack of an ability to use it locally is almost as bad
edit: holy cow the more I read the site the more red flags I see, $2,500 minimum for a bed that doesn’t even have a warranty unless you have an active subscription that hasn’t expired since you bought the bed, the extended warranty is a 5-year warranty that is of course an additional amount of money with the same conditions. I’ve never seen a bed that didn’t have an at least 10 year warranty on it out of the box, most offer a 15 to 20 year warranty.
Well, even a locally controlled bed would have “not worked” (well, it’s still a bed obviously, just not heating/cooling) in a power outage.
Note our household got it when it was significantly cheaper (still expensive-ish, but not nearly as bad as now) and grandfathered into being able to use it without a monthly subscription. In a bit of bad/good luck, because replacements kept leaking, we got warranty-upgraded to the current offering. So get to know how the new stuff is without having had to pay as much or maintain a monthly subscription. When we bought it, at least, they had good warranty coverage for leaks.
So I get to see how good the hardware design fundamentally is while also knowing how anti-consumer the business and software side is going.
Ultimately when/if I lose sane access to the capabilities, I’ll probably start poking around to see about hacking at least the heating and cooling, since we did struggle to find a good comfortable design for such a thing before getting here. They really did at least nail the mattress pad part, and the heating/cooling is pretty good without being obtrusive. The vibration and sensors might be nice, but ultimately I don’t care too much about that.
Yea power outage makes sense given what it does. It’s good that you got it cheaper, currently see the pods starting $2500 and the higher end is $5500, for a bed that requires a $17-27 a month subscription, and doesn’t work if you lack internet is insane to me. excluding the warrenty part of it. Sad to see they downgraded their protections and quality
I now only buy offline or local-only software and products. If it doesn’t exist, I hack it.
An offline flushing app is not much better in this case.
Subscribe and we reserve the right to throttle flush speed/volume after 6pm.
Standard app doesn’t cover diarrhea or menstruation - those are luxury secretions for our plus members
So accurate
