Can you set up Apple Watch alarms from your laptop?

November 12, 2023 4:10 PM

I set many alarms on my iPhone to keep me on time throughout each workday (e.g. alarms 10 and 2 minutes before each Zoom meeting, then 2 minutes before the Zoom's end to remind me to wrap things up). Creating this many alarms on my phone is slow; I wish I could set them up via my Macbook, and have them go off on my phone. If I get an Apple Watch, is there a way for me to set the watch's alarms *from my Apple laptop*?

* Googling just gives me 100 explanations of how to set alarms on the Apple Watch, rather than if I can set the Apple Watch's alarms from my Macbook.
* I need the alarms to go off either on my iPhone or Apple Watch; alarms going off on my laptop don't work (may be away from my laptop, notifications sometimes get buried, etc.)
* The alarms are often for different meeting topics/times, so using the repeating alarm feature doesn't help reduce the amount of input for each day's alarms.
Thank you!

posted by rollcredits to Technology (11 answers total)

Best answer: You use iCal to set alarms 10 min and 2 min before each meeting when you schedule the meeting - obviously most helpful when the meetings repeat or when if you click on a prior example that already has the alarms set. Won't solve the 2 minutes before the end problem though. I might just set a timer at the beginning of each meeting - it remembers recent times so if meeting are usually 60 or 90 minutes you can quickly set a 58 or 88 minutes timer at the start.
posted by metahawk at 4:46 PM on November 12, 2023

Best answer: You cannot, as far as I can tell. Apple Alarms don't sync with iCloud.

However, setting alarms on the iPhone or Watch is much easier with Siri than the user interface. Siri on iOS 17 also has better understanding. So, you can say, "Set an alarm for 10 minutes," and then when Siri says done you can just say, "and for 2 o'clock" and then "and 330" or whatever. But that's only on the phone and only if you have iOS 17 and those alarms won't ring on the watch.
posted by dobbs at 4:51 PM on November 12, 2023

Best answer: To be clear, you can use Siri to set alarms on the Watch, but Siri on the watch only takes one instruction at a time so you have to press the crown between each command or say "hey siri" between each command.
posted by dobbs at 4:56 PM on November 12, 2023

Best answer: You might’ve able to use Apple shortcuts to set a calendar alert for 2 minutes before the end of a meeting, which will then make your watch vibrate. I have an iPhone and non Apple smart watch, and I automated the 10 minutes before in my outlook calendar.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 5:20 PM on November 12, 2023

Best answer: In the thinking of Apple land the 'Alarm' is neither for reminders nor scheduling. I use ical, sorry 'Calendar' to for setting alerts in a shared calendar from my desktop that then gets pushed to my other devices. For example, I have an 'iCloud' calendar that is the default on my desktop and the settings for any new event are to include alerts 15 minutes before as a warning.

Any event can have many alerts tied to it, so it's possible to have a message with sound pop up 10 minutes out, another 2 minutes and even a third one that's 50 minutes after the start the event. All associated with the one event. It's trivial to set up repeating events but I often 'reuse' events just by dragging them from yesterday over to tomorrow. I also have my work calendar set up to show up in my apple desktop so I can quickly copy those events into my iCloud calendar.

You would need to set the sync rate to match how often you are updating this system - the minimum time is 1 minute to sync through iCloud.

If you are finding your reminders getting buried you can change that setting on you computer under Settings>Notifications>Calendar and change the show preview to always and Notification grouping to off. These changes mean that future notifications from the calendar app will not be grouped together and each notification will get it's own preview (where ever those previews are permitted)
posted by zenon at 8:25 PM on November 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: zenon has it.

And an "Alarm" on the watch, in the Alarms app, is for a specific time of day, unrelated to Calendar events. And can only be set on the watch.
posted by fabius at 1:50 AM on November 13, 2023

Best answer: I've found that Alarms set on the Phone ring on both the phone and watch; alarms set on the watch only ring on the watch. For this reason, I tend to set an alarm on the Apple Watch for "semi-important" alarms, and for "very important" alarms I set them on the iPhone.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 10:45 AM on November 13, 2023

Best answer: Alarms in all devices from one device is something you can absolutely do in Fantastical. Unfortunately my employer decided to ban connections to Outlook/Exchange from personal devices, so I have no reason to continue using it (my meeting schedule is far too complex to keep up with manually).
posted by lhauser at 11:42 AM on November 13, 2023

Best answer: It occurrs to me that there could be a workaround though at the moment I'm drunk so forgive me if this does not make sense.

You could download a third party tasks app that allows you to set a pre-alarm for events. I think Sorted allows this but no doubt there are others. You go into the settings and set the "default alerts" for 70 min prior and 62 mins prior and 2 mins prior.

Then, say someone has a 1 hour appt that begins at 8PM. You actually set it for 9 and you'll get an alert at 750, 758 (10 and 2 mins before it begins), and 858 (2 mins before it ends), which I think is what you want.
posted by dobbs at 6:02 PM on November 13, 2023

Best answer: Just checking in on this while sober to say that indeed, my workaround works.

To be clear: you set your "pre-alerts" only once and they apply to all events / tasks you create.

So, in Sorted (which is a free app) you go into settings and chose early alert. There you can set up to 4 pre-alerts. So you could do 70 mins and 65 mins and 5 mins. Then, set your event for an hour after it begins and you'll get warnings 10 and 5 mins prior to beginning and 5 mins prior to ending.

Unfortunately, there seems to only be increments of 5 mins so you can't do a minute prior. This seems to be case in Apple Reminders as well so is probably a limitation imposed by Apple for Task apps, which seems both stupid and impossible.
posted by dobbs at 10:21 AM on November 15, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone. Apple shortcuts ended up addressing my alarm-setting issue. I had not realized it was something you can use without Siri (which I don't want on for privacy reasons), but it lets you set all kinds of things to happen on your phone at certain times or after certain triggers. It's actually kind of a fun simple-coding games, with if/then building blocks etc.
posted by rollcredits at 3:13 PM on December 10, 2023