The Pod is an intelligent mattress Cover that cools, heats, tracks, and responds on both sides of the bed, powered by a Hub that has historically sat beside the bed at about 16 inches tall. With the launch of Pod 6, that height was cut in half. At just 8 inches tall, the Hub is now small enough to fit under most bed frames and blend into the bedroom.
Size was the priority, but it was never solely about making the Hub smaller. The team fought for every inch of space, all while making it more powerful and even quieter.
“I think what’s amazing is that we’re able to take something of this size to this [smaller size] — which is less than half its original size — without making any compromise to thermal performance, to sound, to overall system efficiency.”
—Harry Xiao, Director of Hardware Programs
Determine what stays, and what can go
Thermal hardware resists miniaturization. Heat pumps need surface area to move heat. Fans need clearance to move air. Water needs somewhere to live. Making those parts smaller only recovers so much volume, so the first question was what the Hub no longer needed to contain.
The answer was the water tank. Previous generations stored water in a removable tank on the Hub, and it accounted for a considerable share of the total volume. Pod 6 replaces it with an internal reservoir and a direct fill system: pour into the Hub, and the Cover draws the water in. The tank’s footprint disappeared. So did most of the wait. Priming dropped from up to 940 minutes on earlier generations to under five minutes.
Build everything around the heat sink
With the tank gone, the Hub was reorganized around the component that matters most. Every watt of heat pulled from the Cover and every watt drawn from the power supply has to be dissipated through the heat sink. In Pod 6, nearly the entire Hub is one. The power supply mounts directly to it.
The thermoelectric coolers went from two per side to three. The heat sink was redesigned to carry that added load, split into two halves with the fans between them, so the same airflow does more work in less space. The power supply grew to 550 watts, about 30% more than any previous Hub.
“What this heat exchanger is doing is trying to, as efficiently as possible, take that heat from your body and then reject it out without utilizing too much energy… That’s really one of the biggest engineering challenges of the Hub itself: to make that heat transfer as efficient as possible, so that it can both be quiet, not heat up your room too much, and not increase your energy bill.”
— Nathan Lepore, Hub Technical Lead
Make the industrial design functional
A smaller Hub moving more air carries one obvious risk: noise. Pod 6 addresses it from the outside in. The ribbed exterior is a functional airflow system. Each fin carries a micro airfoil profile that lowers resistance and reduces flow separation, the turbulence that generates sound.
Inside, the fans run at the lowest speed the system can tolerate. Sensors on the power supply and throughout the Hub adjust fan speed to actual temperatures rather than worst-case assumptions. Then every tone that remained was traced to its source in an anechoic chamber and engineered out.
“In a system where we have this natural tension between more airflow, more power, more heat rejection, and this very delicate thing like noise, the only way we can have our cake and eat it too is to do the proper engineering work to chase down every single tone, root cause it, and implement a corrective action.”
— Nathan Lepore, Hub Technical Lead
Engineer the price down
None of this came from a single breakthrough. It came from deciding, component by component, which problems to solve electrically, which mechanically, and which in software, then integrating the answers so tightly that the Hub costs less to build than the one it replaced. That is why Pod 6 starts at $1,999.
“There’s really three ways to solve an engineering problem: electrical, mechanical, or software. The magic arises when you find the right balance and you’re solving the right problems with the right hammer.”
– Alex Ludnow, Staff Electrical Engineer
