A thermostat for the one room you spend a third of your life in.

Your house has a thermostat. Your bed probably doesn't.

We think hard about the things in a bedroom we can see: the frame, the linen, the lamp, the light at the window. Temperature gets decided somewhere down the hall, for every room at once, and then we lie in whatever it chose. But the room you sleep in isn't only what it looks like. Temperature is part of the room too.

The Pod 6 is Eight Sleep's attempt to give your bed one of its own. It comes in two parts. The Cover is about an inch thick and goes over the mattress you already have, like a fitted sheet, with water running through channels inside it. The Hub is a ribbed box about sixteen inches long that heats or cools that water and sends it to the bed through a single cord. On a standard Pod, each side is set separately, anywhere from 55°F to 110°F. The person who is always cold and the person who is always warm can stop negotiating over the duvet.

Most technology in a house asks for your attention. Screens light up, speakers answer back, apps send reminders. What's interesting about the Pod is how little of it you're meant to notice. There is nothing to look at in bed. This generation's Hub is half the size of the last, and Eight Sleep designed it to slide under most bed frames or sit quietly beside the nightstand. Once it's set up, the job is simple: you get into bed, and it's the temperature you wanted.

The best technology in a bedroom may be the technology you stop noticing.

We make the Encino Bed, so we spend a lot of time thinking about this room. The Encino is walnut, weight and proportion. The Pod is water channels, sensors and software. They could hardly be more different, and neither needs the other. But both are trying to answer the same question: what makes the hours you spend in this room better?

Now the part that would make us hesitate. The Pod 6 costs less than any Pod before it, and it still isn't cheap: $1,999 for one side of the bed, and $2,699 to $2,999 for the whole bed, depending on size. Then there's Autopilot, Eight Sleep's membership. It is required for the first year and costs $199, $299 or $399, billed annually. Autopilot runs the things most of the Pod's marketing is about: the automatic adjustments through the night, the schedules, the alarms and the sleep reports. After the first year you can cancel. Eight Sleep says you keep manual control of each side's temperature, but everything automatic stops. So does the warranty. Eight Sleep's warranty, two years or five depending on the plan, only applies while your membership is active.

We don't love subscriptions attached to physical objects. Something you've paid thousands for should go on being yours whether or not you keep paying. To be fair, the part of the Pod we care about, the temperature, survives without the membership. The warranty doesn't. That is worth knowing before you buy. So is the fact that, after the first year, the hardware on its own is a manual thermostat for your bed, and nothing more. Decide whether that would be enough for you. If it wouldn't, the membership isn't really optional.

If it is right for you, the best version of it is the one you stop thinking about. You get into bed. It's already the temperature you like, on your side and on theirs. You read a few pages, turn off the lamp, and forget it's there.