A clock to kick my phone out of the bedroom
July 26, 2023 9:41 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for an alarm clock that makes a gentle sound similar to my iPhone's alarm, so I can sleep in a phone-free room and avoid habitual late night surfing / groggy morning scrolling. More details below the fold.

I already have a sunrise alarm (which produces light only, no sound). I'm a somewhat heavy sleeper. To wake up in the morning gently but reliably, I prefer to pair the sunrise alarm with my iPhone's alarm, which is a simple, melodious musical phrase that gradually grows in volume. It isn't sudden, there are no harsh staccato beeping noises, and nothing about it is adrenalizing or upsetting. It's perfect, except for being attached to a distraction device!

When I wake up with my infinity machine in my hand, inevitably my sleep-drugged brain, totally groggy and possessing zero willpower, will decide that endless, half-conscious scrolling is the ideal way to spend my morning. I have a similar problem at night. So I need a way to kick the pocket computer out of my bedroom, but without reverting to a jarring alarm.

All I need is a simple alarm clock -- old-school except without the old-school "jolt you awake" approach to the alarm itself. I'd prefer it not produce any light at night. I also need it to function on battery backup (as in, if the power goes out, I need my alarm clock to still go off).

Ideally, it would also be cheap.

So far this has been surprisingly hard to find. I don't need my alarm clock to read me bedtime stories, have an app that connects to my phone, or play streaming radio stations. I just want it to sing me gently awake at a time I set, gradually increasing its volume so I wake up reliably but gently, and to function whether or not the power goes out. Think of it as wanting a reverse lullaby for the mornings.

Anyone have an alarm clock that fits my needs?
posted by cnidaria to Shopping (14 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Way overbuilt (and thus overpriced) for your needs, but, just in case: the Grace Internet radio can fade in whatever it's playing as an alarm gradually.
posted by praemunire at 9:44 PM on July 26, 2023


Get an old phone perhaps a flip phone if it's clock/alarm system allows you to play a music file for an alarm. For this purpose even a 2G phone will do. Put it in airplane mode. Uninstall all apps except clock/alarm. Make an .mp3 of the sound you want to wake up to (or if possible, copy it from your iPhone). Use that phone for your alarm. You could probably keep it plugged into the charger, but if it's an ancient flip phone standby time will be days even if the power is out.

This keeps an old electronic thing out of the landfill too.
posted by TimHare at 9:50 PM on July 26, 2023 [5 favorites]


A lot of smart speakers have this functionality - Alexa devices have a repertoire of different alarm sounds, for example, and you can also set a routine to wake you with a specific musical track or even podcast. Also in my house, at least, I have a lot of Alexa devices (honestly not sure why, my husband just kept buying them every time they were on sale until we had them in every room including the basement) and if I let a timer or alarm go too long, all the other devices in the house will also eventually start going off.

A simple SD-card compatible alarm clock should also do what you need - you would need to find/ or create a track (or series of tracks) that has the gentle-to-more-insistent sound profile that you need and load it onto the card but you'd only have to do it once.

I don't have a specific model to recommend but there are a ton of these on Amazon with the usual alphabet-soup brand names.
posted by mskyle at 12:18 AM on July 27, 2023


You could go old school. Browse your local thrift shops for an old cassette player, the kind that used to be sold before computers wormed their way into everything so it has the old-style piano-key mechanical controls and a real power switch and if you set it to Play it will just start doing that as soon as you supply it with power. Don't put batteries in it, just run it off an AC adapter plugged into a timer switch.

You should be able to put something together for very little money that not only does exactly what you want and nothing else, but actually sounds quite nice too.
posted by flabdablet at 4:39 AM on July 27, 2023


Perhaps the Arc?

However, what I would do is get a lifetime subscription to Freedom and just set it for my sleeping hours which would prevent any apps at all from being used at that time and just continue using my phone's alarm.
posted by dobbs at 5:09 AM on July 27, 2023


I have one of the older Phillips sunrise alarm clocks and it also makes noise that gradually increases.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 5:33 AM on July 27, 2023 [3 favorites]


Alternatively you could use Freedom or something similar to block surfing during problematic times. I have it set to cut me off from 10pm midnight, so it also doubles as a way to get me to bed on time.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:59 AM on July 27, 2023


Response by poster: The Arc looks like the (expensive) version of what I'm looking for! I'd really prefer an analog clock face if possible.

Not interested in another paid app subscription, or using an old phone. The cassette player idea sounds cool, but I'm not sure how I'd power-outage-proof the player and timer -- I'm sure there's a way but I'm trying not to get too complex here.
posted by cnidaria at 6:44 AM on July 27, 2023


Response by poster: Arc also doesn't ship til 2024, but it's the sort of thing I'd be interested in, especially if it was a bit cheaper.
posted by cnidaria at 6:46 AM on July 27, 2023


I was looking for the exact same thing myself for the exact same reasons and also found it surprisingly hard to find. I settled on the Loftie alarm clock, which I would call good but not amazing. It fulfills all your criteria except battery backup (I still set my phone alarm in another room as a fail-safe and also to force myself to actually get out of bed instead of falling back asleep), and price (it's way overpriced, in my opinion). I miss my ipod-plugged-into-an-always-on-bose-speaker system of the olden days.
posted by carlypennylane at 7:26 AM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


Here's a link to the Loftie clock.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 7:34 AM on July 27, 2023


I'm not sure how far back (which is to say: how cheaply - I know the $299 refurb Watch 7 and $339 refurb Watch 8 do, but I can't say for certain whether the $249 Watch SE does), but the Apple Watch has the same family of birdsong and gentle bloops and bleeps alarms as the iPhone, doesn't make any light at night in sleep mode, will inherit / transfer the same Focus modes as your phone is using (which is to say DND or Sleep Focus), and honestly while you _can_ kind of maybe sort of doomscroll email or News for a hot minute, it's functionally limited enough that it's unlikely to work as a distraction. You get away with putting your phone in the next room so it doesn't disturb you, and the watch works fairly well "offline" for alarm purposes. (Annoyingly so if you have multiple watches - the one that isn't currently connected to the phone will continue to alarm even after you disable it on the phone because, well, it's not connected. Annoying, but unsurprising.)

Plus sleep tracking, movement and health tracking blah blah all that. And the watch alarm does a taptic buzz which I find wakes me up before I usually hear the alarm over my various white noise machines.
posted by Kyol at 12:43 PM on July 27, 2023


Response by poster: Just an update in case other people are looking for this kind of thing:

If I could wait for order fulfillment (and vaporware didn't make me nervous), I'd definitely go with the Arc! Too bad it doesn't ship until 2024.

I considered the Zen Alarm Clock but from what I can tell, the digital ones break frequently and the non-digital ones make a clicking noise. Also too bad, because I like the idea of the chime that gradually sounds more frequently to wake you up gently (similar concept to the Arc).

Also considered the Enzo Pearl but it's pretty overpriced for what it is, and as far as I can tell, it only rings twice, which doesn't work well for me for a wake-up alarm.

I'm currently looking at the Early Bird clock that has bird sounds, and the Mudita clock that has peaceful music. Leaning toward the Mudita but not sure yet.
posted by cnidaria at 6:38 PM on July 28, 2023


Response by poster: Update in case anyone is interested: I got the Mudita Harmony 2 and I love it! The alarm has the features that I want (pre-alarm chime and snooze chimes at user-selectable intervals), produces beautiful and gentle alarm sounds, and has lovely controls. There are two buttons plus a large knob that you can turn, shallow press, and deep press. I really enjoy having controls that are tactile and make intuitive sense.

I have combined my Mudita alarm clock with my existing wake-up tools: a silent sunrise alarm that slowly gets brighter in the morning, and bed cooler that gradually heats up on a schedule to wake me. (Apparently I'm a bit high-maintenance when it comes to waking up in the morning!)

In addition to using the alarm clock instead of my phone, I made some (free!) changes to my iPhone tilt it towards "useful tool" and away from "pocket distraction demon":
- I set the color scheme to default to grayscale to make the screen itself less interesting. I also set triple-press on the side button to turn on color when I need it (for reading maps or reviewing photos, for example).
- I started using Screentime downtime limits on non-essential apps between 8pm and 8am. This minor barrier is annoying enough that I don't usually bother to circumvent it. Some folks might need Freedom, as people suggested in the answers above, but I found just using Screentime works fine for me.
- I deleted Firefox and Chrome, and turned off Safari under "Content and Privacy Restrictions" -> "Allowed Apps". If I actually need a web browser and can't use a computer, I can go into the menus and turn it on again. But just having it turned off gives me time to think about my life choices, and the process of turning it back on again is sufficiently annoying that I usually don't bother.
- I completely deleted all the apps I could. I also deleted the home screen app icons for any apps I wanted to keep in the App Library, but don't use regularly. I let myself keep one screen's worth of commonly-used apps, including Settings, a monthly calendar, clock, a meaningful photo that looks good in grayscale and also gently nudges me to pay attention to the things I actually care about (set with Widgetsmith), and 10 actual apps.
- I (rather laboriously) used Shortcuts to set custom black-and-white icons for each of the remaining apps on the Home Screen, to de-clutter the screen visually and to make the icons more legible with the grayscale color scheme. I downloaded free black-and-white app icons to use for this by Googling. A nice side effect of this is that the Shortcuts custom icons don't show any alerts, so I no longer see any distracting little red boxes trying to prompt me to check something. (I have other ways of making sure I receive messages or calls if I need to. I don't need tiny aggressive numeric alerts on my app icons pestering me to stay up to date!)
- I set up useful widgets on the Widget Panel screen, including weather, train and bus departures, and a monitor for battery life on my AirPods, so I can check this stuff quickly without needing to dive deeper into my phone.
posted by cnidaria at 1:18 PM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]


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