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Comment by pushedx | Hacker News Reader

I still use the alarm clock that I was given when I was 11. The iPhone alarm will sometimes just go off silently (I've watched it happen), which is my most hated "feature".

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When I moved to Sweden in 1998, I bought an radio alarm clock with a wire to plug it in and big red numbers. Big softly glowing red numbers. Easy on the eyes. I got a little discount because the cover for the battery was missing and I was a poor student at the time. But because it was going to be plugged in, I did not care about having a battery. I've since moved country four times but this thing is still next to my bed. I love being able to glance at it at night with a half open eye and know what time it is. That's it's only function. I don't use the alarm very often and if I do, I use my phone for that. And I haven't listened to the radio in well over ten years. It's the clock that is important to me.

> I love being able to glance at it at night with a half open eye and know what time it is.

You mean confirming that the time you already knew it was, was actually correct.

Just like you also wake up 2 minutes before the alarm goes off.

> iPhone alarm will sometimes just go off silently

Oh man, as a recent android to iOS convert I thought I was just doing it wrong. The alarm feature of this phone is utterly useless it’s so unreliable. It just decides randomly (from what I can tell) to silence itself with no user interaction. Luckily it hasn’t resulted in major life consequences yet, but I’ve learned to not even bother with it.

Thanks for returning a tiny bit of my sanity!

Whichever programmer or team was responsible for this “feature” that decides you know better than me, why?!?

My current conspiracy theory is it’s the wearables team since then only way to be certain you will at least get some physical/audible feedback it’s time to wake up is by wearing your Apple Watch to bed. Then you get to deal with frantic charging it before your flight or whatnot, fun times!

For a long time the Android alarm will silence itself randomly; I've replaced it with a $9 Casio travel clock, the battery lasts forever

After my wife stole (back) her high school alarm clock I wasn't satisfied with the replacements. But I picked up an old one for $0.25 at a market festival recently and am pretty happy with it.

I recently had my alarm clock I was given when I was a teenager fail on me, 30 years later. Even when plugged in, it occasionally turns off. Got a few good decades out of it, though.

I'm going to guess that would be an easy and cheap fix if it's just a power issue? Wild guess but perhaps just a capacitor finally got spent

Always these pesky capacitors (I had like 3 LCD monitors with a faulty capacitor from prolonged use, it is somewhat of an easy fix, no need to throw away the whole monitor).

I'm more of a software/econ nerd. Where would I even start if I wanted to repair this?

I once missed a flight because of this. I believe it is (or was) linked to the volume level on the phone.

And yeah, my decades-old alarm clock remains reliable (though it can be a struggle to remember how to set the time after the power goes out…)

I've been an iPhone user since 2016, Android before that. After the first few times I encountered the silent alarm problem, I would make sure to unmute the phone before bed, and also max out both the alert volume control and media volume control, simply tanking the sound of the alerts during the night hoping that the alarm would work. Even doing this, I would still watch the alarm go off silently.

I'm convinced that this was one of the reasons that the sleep schedule app was created, because they wanted to see if a different team wouldn't introduce the same bug.

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