I was born 1990±2, but I have always been an old soul. I've been waking up to BBC Radio 4 since I was a teenager.
My current one used to belong to my dad, it's a Sony dream machine with FM/AM, circa 2002.
(Sometimes I have it in my bedroom sometimes not, just depends on where I happened to leave it when I go to bed. I do not look at the phone in bed).
I have had this particular alarm clock for literally 35 years. What I prize about it is the ability to set the alarm time with two big dials on front, instead of having to press next-next-next buttons on the bottom.
I do not know what I will do when it finally breaks.
I can't find a picture of it online, I'm not sure if I'm describing it in a way anyone understands, it does not seem to be a well-known alarm clock. It is one (of many) "Sony Dream Machine" models, but most don't have this feature. The front has two big dials side by side. The left one has 24 marked positions, for each of the 24 hours in the day, color-coded for day and night. the other on the right has 12 positions for the 60 minutes in 5 minute increments. So you can just turn one and turn the other to easily set the alarm to whatever time you like (well, whatever time on 5 minute increments!)
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/sony_dream_machine_ez_4.html
I've never had one - I was just also curious, so I scrolled through more Dream Machine images than I should have.
i would have thought the picture you found was from the 70s or something, but it says circa 1990 same as mine, who knows!
Here's a photo from right now of mine, still doing it's job continuously since circa 1990:
Mine also has "Power Back Up for Clock (9V)" which is a nice feature. With a life 9V battery, if the power goes out, it doesn't show the time and won't sound the alarm, but it keeps the time, so when the power goes back on it still has good time, and your alarm will still go off. For an intermittent power interruption in the middle of the night.
It occurs to me that some people have never actually experienced an old digital clock, but the more typical way to set the alarm (or time) was two buttons on the BOTTOM of the thing, one labelled "hour" one labelled "minute", and you had to pick up the device and press or hold each button to increment that portion of the time: 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, etc. Truly terrible UX! But universal for a couple decades! In my opinion the ones above were really an innovation! Which never caught on (probably were patented) before the decline of non-computerized digital alarm clocks.
I want one. Those big dials are super fun to use by all appearances too.
Another alarm clock had been built by my father, some 50 years ago, from medium-scale integration TTL circuits, before the apparition of dedicated integrated circuits for clocks. It still worked perfectly, and because it used a thermo-compensated quartz oscillator it had a much higher accuracy than the cheap quartz clocks or watches that can be bought now.
Since then, whenever I need an alarm or to know the time, I just use a smartphone or computer. I was born much earlier, so I have used dedicated alarm clocks for several decades, but I do not like to use superfluous things, so I no longer use dedicated alarm clocks (or wrist watches or TV sets etc.).
That does not mean that I do not like clocks, either mechanical or electronic. I like them, but I do no longer need them, so I like to examine them like I like to examine some ancient sword, which is beautiful, but for which I do not have any use in my daily life.
It's some Sony radio clock, given to me by a relative 8-10 years ago, likely from Walmart or someplace similar. I have it set to the local classical station which is usually more pleasant to wake up to than the beeper. (Though occasionally, train horns in the distance will sound like trumpets, and I'll wake up and have to determine if it's a literal false alarm or not!)
One strange thing about this clock is, it seems to have a half-implemented support for dimming the display. You can get the display to dim by mashing the snooze bar, but once it's dim there's no going back unless you pull the plug and the backup battery. I saw a thread on a forum once about people discussing this odd behavior, but nobody seemed to have any explanation.
My eyesight is so bad that, without my glasses, I cannot see the numbers on my iPhone, even when using the big number display in standby mode. About a decade ago I got a cheap no name thing off of Amazon with a 4” high LED display. That I can see!
I rushed to bed that night, set the clock, turned the lights off, got into bed, took off my glasses and... realised I couldn't see the projected time on the ceiling.
Recently, I have built my own: <https://masysma.net/37/dcf77_vfd_raspi_clock.xhtml>
Before that (and now for redundancy, I think my own one still has some minor bugs), I used a cheap one by "OK" <https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_ok-ocr-310-2172968.htm...>.
I don't like that I have to mash some tiny buttons to set the "OK" up and also to stop it. The LED that shows that the alarm is active is also hard to read for me. Hence I tried to improve upon this in my own design. I also found a solution to avoid the backup battery, but it is probably not what the "general public" would like to have either :)
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/nintendo-sound-cl...
Seems a strange thing to do in 2024.
So it's an alarm clock that checks your subscription is still active before waking you up. Welcome to the future. I hope AWS doesn't go down around 6:45am.
I strongly believe that in the same way you should have at least 2 alarm clocks, one of which is of a different type. I strongly believe that you should use your phone and a dedicated alarm clock. Apple has released bugs that caused the alarm clock not to run, or do so at a wrong time. Likewise it is always possible for your normal alarm clock to lose power or run out of battery.
Having both failures on the same day is a lot less likely.
Very HN. And a redundant mode of transport to work, a backup fridge on a redundant power source.
I draw the line after spare coffee grinding and brewing facilities.
Ask me how I know.
I like the 70s style, I don't like the invasive elements of modern tech. I do like them however when I have full control over them.
> If you flashed an alarm clock, what would you make it do?
No idea, but it might be fun to get it to pick a random global streaming radio station, keep its time in sync via NTP, set it remotely from another device, use it as a remote key for a safe or door, etc. When you control the tech, the limits are whatever you set.
Downsides: Very expensive, it stopped working at one point but I replaced the power adapter and it was fine, tinny speakers like I said, and its design is round and on a very narrow base so it'll topple whenever you smack its touch sensitive surface to snooze it.
Before that I had a traditional alarm clock with yellow letters, radio, the works, had that for like 20 years before replacing it. The letters on that were stupidly bright so we stuck an unused photo film in front of it with tape.
Then on one super rough day, both my wife and I were just drained! We hit the bed and were gone, snoozing hard.
Well, neither of us managed to have a phone charged well enough to wake us up and so we just didn't! Kid late for school, late for work, late, late... total pig of a day.
I picked up a $10 clock almost exactly the same as our old one, which did not survive our last move.
Now it has a fresh 9V battery and is set a bit behind the phones. It is the backup.
And we both kind of like having it again. We get a time display at a glance and it does wake us up nicely without being brutal.
These things are simple tech, but useful, low hassle tech too.
I don’t allow anything more complicated than that, a light and a book in the bedroom.
[0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2074185253/ramos-alarm-...
I use one because the sound on my android refuses to work (I am pretty sure it's a software bug, not a hardware failure, but i have no proof).since otherwise, the phone works correctly, i am not replacing it..
One dial to set the time, another to set the alarm.
Someone in their design team decided alarms are optional and that sometimes they should just go off silently for reasons.
Utterly stupid feature I didn’t have time to figure out so back to a real alarm clock for waking up on days it’s important to do so.
Whoever decided to make alarms “adaptive” at Apple must have never had a real actual honest job in their life. Utterly infuriating.
...but then if you re-use that timer (accidentally) it will be "sticky" to stop playing instead of chiming.
Super frustrating! For as good as Apple's UX can be, they have some really bone-headed behaviors and designs in their core apps.
I never had the patentice to fuss with actually setting the alarm using the irritating multiple-mode/single-button controls and extra layer of complexity of multiple alarms, alarms for weekends, and whether you want a pre-selected radio station to play rather than the buzzer. To make it worse, when I did wake up groggy to the alarm I invariably hit the largest button to make it stop-- snooze, only to be further irritated when it would go off again as I was having breakfast.