GQ's Eight Sleep Pod 4 Cover Review (2024)
GQ RecommendsGetting my daily eight hours has never been easier (or more satisfying).By Ali FinneyNovember 26, 2024Save this storySaveSave this storySaveAll products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.About a year ago, after heeding the advice of celebrity athletes and billionaires alike, I strapped an Eight Sleep Pod 3 cover to my bed, downloaded the app to my phone, and hoped for the best. The results were a near-immediate improvement in my sleep. They were so universal in fact, that when I begrudgingly gave up my bed to my parents during a visit, my very offline dad—who once said he’d swap his iPhone for smoke signals if he could—wanted in on the techiest thing in sleep. Then came the Eight Sleep Pod 4 cover, and again, my sleep was revolutionized through a completely redesigned mattress cover and an app. While Dad’s review is forthcoming, mine is here for your consideration before purchase.Eight SleepPod 4 Cover$2,549 $2,499 Eight SleepEight SleepPod 4 Ultra$4,049 $3,949 Eight SleepProsActs like a tracker you don’t have to wearEnsures you sleep at the perfect temperature10-year warranty for the coverQuieter than previous modelsConsExpensiveYou have to pay for app subscriptionSlightly changes the feel of the bedTakes a minute to understand your preferencesSpecsSizes Available: Queen, king, California kingWarranty: 5 yearsReturn Policy: 30 daysSpecial Features: Automatic temperature control, dual climate control, vibration and thermal alarm, snore detection, phone-free controlJump To: What It Is | What’s the Deal With the Eight Sleep App | What Distinguishes the Pod 4 from the Pod 3 | ReviewWhat Is Eight Sleep?For those unfamiliar with the premise of the Eight Sleep Pod, it’s a smart mattress cover that fits over your mattress like a fitted sheet. It has built-in tubing through which water travels to cool or warm the bed's surface to keep your core body temperature optimized and sensors that track key sleep metrics. Those two things taken together are important because they link up to one another to work something like this: You hit the hay and the mattress sensors are constantly reading metrics like your heart rate and breathing. If you turn on the Autopilot feature via the app, for example, the AI-driven recommendations take the temperature up and down at different times during the night to help you wake up feeling refreshed.While these temperature changes do make you more noticeably comfortable while you’re trying to go to sleep, they also are meant to help you get better sleep. Research indicates that heat is enemy number one when it comes to getting poor sleep, causing deleterious effects on sleep stages such as REM and slow-wave. One of the first praises that many people sing of the Pod 4 is that it helps them go to sleep faster and sink into a deeper sleep that isn’t constantly battling heat cues to wake them up.I figure that the Pod 5, 6, or 7 may come up with an ingenious way to lose the “hub,” a bulky-ish water tank central processor that is the command center for all of this temperature-regulating magic, but the Pod 4 still is connected to it, so you should account for a place to put this in your bedroom (under a bedside table or beside it, for example).The Eight Sleep Pod 4 hub. Photo by Ali Finney; tested by Ali Finney. The Eight Sleep mattress cover out of the box. Photo by Ali Finney; tested by Ali Finney. What’s the Deal With the Eight Sleep AppIt’s worth taking a beat to tell you a little about the app itself which is one of my favorite parts of the whole system. The app (available on iOS and Android) scores your sleep based on three key inputs: how well you stick to your sleep schedule, the quality of your sleep, and time you slept.Sleeping ScheduleResearch seems to suggest health benefits for people who follow a dedicated sleep-wake schedule. In practice, that means you’re diligent and disciplined about a bedtime and you don’t mess around by hitting snooze when your alarm rings the next morning. This is so advanced that the Eight Sleep app actually hits you with a reminder about bedtime 30 minutes before it’s time for your regularly scheduled programming. To track this, the new pod will monitor the time you got in and out of bed, the time you fell asleep, and the time time you wake up.Sleep QualityThe quality of your sleep is dictated by in-depth biometrics such as heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and respiratory rate. The sleep tracking device takes all of these into consideration to see how long you were in different stages of sleep: deep sleep, REM sleep, and light sleep. My app fully trolls me on nights when I have a couple of glasses of wine with a push notification in the morning asking if I feel less rested because my heart rate was above average.Time Spent AsleepMuch to my chagrin, the Eight Sleep rigidly docks your sleep if you fall below seven hours or above nine hours—both of which I have done
All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
About a year ago, after heeding the advice of celebrity athletes and billionaires alike, I strapped an Eight Sleep Pod 3 cover to my bed, downloaded the app to my phone, and hoped for the best. The results were a near-immediate improvement in my sleep. They were so universal in fact, that when I begrudgingly gave up my bed to my parents during a visit, my very offline dad—who once said he’d swap his iPhone for smoke signals if he could—wanted in on the techiest thing in sleep. Then came the Eight Sleep Pod 4 cover, and again, my sleep was revolutionized through a completely redesigned mattress cover and an app. While Dad’s review is forthcoming, mine is here for your consideration before purchase.
Specs
- Sizes Available: Queen, king, California king
- Warranty: 5 years
- Return Policy: 30 days
- Special Features: Automatic temperature control, dual climate control, vibration and thermal alarm, snore detection, phone-free control
What Is Eight Sleep?
For those unfamiliar with the premise of the Eight Sleep Pod, it’s a smart mattress cover that fits over your mattress like a fitted sheet. It has built-in tubing through which water travels to cool or warm the bed's surface to keep your core body temperature optimized and sensors that track key sleep metrics. Those two things taken together are important because they link up to one another to work something like this: You hit the hay and the mattress sensors are constantly reading metrics like your heart rate and breathing. If you turn on the Autopilot feature via the app, for example, the AI-driven recommendations take the temperature up and down at different times during the night to help you wake up feeling refreshed.
While these temperature changes do make you more noticeably comfortable while you’re trying to go to sleep, they also are meant to help you get better sleep. Research indicates that heat is enemy number one when it comes to getting poor sleep, causing deleterious effects on sleep stages such as REM and slow-wave. One of the first praises that many people sing of the Pod 4 is that it helps them go to sleep faster and sink into a deeper sleep that isn’t constantly battling heat cues to wake them up.
I figure that the Pod 5, 6, or 7 may come up with an ingenious way to lose the “hub,” a bulky-ish water tank central processor that is the command center for all of this temperature-regulating magic, but the Pod 4 still is connected to it, so you should account for a place to put this in your bedroom (under a bedside table or beside it, for example).
What’s the Deal With the Eight Sleep App
It’s worth taking a beat to tell you a little about the app itself which is one of my favorite parts of the whole system. The app (available on iOS and Android) scores your sleep based on three key inputs: how well you stick to your sleep schedule, the quality of your sleep, and time you slept.
Research seems to suggest health benefits for people who follow a dedicated sleep-wake schedule. In practice, that means you’re diligent and disciplined about a bedtime and you don’t mess around by hitting snooze when your alarm rings the next morning. This is so advanced that the Eight Sleep app actually hits you with a reminder about bedtime 30 minutes before it’s time for your regularly scheduled programming. To track this, the new pod will monitor the time you got in and out of bed, the time you fell asleep, and the time time you wake up.
The quality of your sleep is dictated by in-depth biometrics such as heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and respiratory rate. The sleep tracking device takes all of these into consideration to see how long you were in different stages of sleep: deep sleep, REM sleep, and light sleep. My app fully trolls me on nights when I have a couple of glasses of wine with a push notification in the morning asking if I feel less rested because my heart rate was above average.
Much to my chagrin, the Eight Sleep rigidly docks your sleep if you fall below seven hours or above nine hours—both of which I have done on occasion. This is the metric that I tend to have the most beef with, as different sleep doctors have told me that your sleep benchmark is completely unique to you. And as Dakota Johnson reminded us last year—some of us just need more ZZZs.
Remarkably, what I have found by fact-checking my sleep score with wearables like the Oura Ring or the Apple Watch is that all of my metric really do tend to agree with the sleep fitness score that the Eight Sleep system gives me daily.
What Distinguishes the Pod 4 from the Pod 3
There are a lot of new features for the Pod 4 and the Pod 4 Ultra (more on that in a sec) that are worth calling out between the different iterations.
One of the gripes of the previous version of the sleep tech was that at times it could by noisy and you could feel the tubing (not the most comfortable sensation for stomach sleepers). For the Pod 4, engineers completely redesigned the way that the water goes through the topper. This allows for the bed to have double the cooling power to help sleepers knock out quicker and get the best sleep possible.
Prior to the latest version, if you had a qualm with the temperature of your bed, you had to bust out your phone to adjust the temperature. The new pod actually delivers a new way to control the temperature of your bed by tapping the side of the bed. Two taps cool the mattress; three taps warm it. You can also tap the side of the pod to snooze alarms and the like.
OK, this isn’t exactly new but it is a defining feature of the Eight Sleep that’s worth mentioning—the dual-side temperature control means that you and your partner can both sleep on the mattress and one of you can be at -10 and the other can be at +10. It also means that if you want to use your mattress as a thermal alarm (there’s also a vibration alarm), you’re able to do so without needing a blaring sound to wake up your partner, too.
If you (or your partner) is guilty of sawing the logs a little too hard, the newest pod is likely a good bet for you. It has advanced snoring detection to tell which side of the bed is snoring and then it adjusts the temperature (and the sleeping position if you have the Pod 4 Ultra) to help stop snoring.
Beyond turning your cheap mattress into a cooling mattress, the Sleep Pod 4 Ultra also has an adjustable base that you can place atop your own bed frame. Throughout the night, in addition to shifting your temperature, it also can adjust your body position and act as a pretty great sleep experience for those who have back pain and can’t get comfy in bed. (Or you can use it to get the best possible reading position before hitting the sack.)
The Bottom Line: Is Eight Sleep Worth It?
Most of my anxiety revolves around sleep—worrying about when I get to go to sleep, stressing about being woken up by toddler cries, and hoping that I won't feel exhausted when I wake up the next day. As a result, I've tried a lot of mediocre sleep tech that hasn't really paid off, but in my experience, the Eight Sleep does. Given that, if you are financially able (it is expensive) and interested in improving your sleep, then the Eight Sleep Pod 4 cover is a no-brainer for you and your set-up.
The redefined tubing system not only gets your bed cooler than it otherwise would, but it operates completely silently, so you won't need a noisy air conditioner or white noise machine to cover the sound of it working. In my experience, the Eight Sleep helps you to go to sleep quicker and it also helps you to find more restful sleep so that you wake up and feel ready to go rather than groggily needing to go through your day.
The individual snoring detection is also something that previous Pods weren't great at distinguishing—for example, when my partner snored, my sleep score would get docked. The Pod 4 can tell the difference so I still get an A+ and he gets…whatever he gets. The tap-control is also a gamechanger. The effects of blue light on our brains and alertness has been well documented by researchers to disrupt sleep and cue your brain to wake. Being able to side step your device to control the temperature is a big win for the Pod 4, and means that those easily distracted by the bright lights of the iPhone won't have their sleep score disrupted as a result.
If you have a Pod 3 and are wondering whether it's time to upgrade, the new features make it worth the investment, particularly if you're interested in snoring mitigation or getting your bed ice-cold. For those who are first-time buyers, you're easily acquiring the most advanced, well-featured Eight Sleep the world has ever seen. You'll get more restful sleep, and as a result, you'll feel more rested, as well.
