As were many consumer electronics, radios, walkmans, calculators, landline phones, etc.
Get your own shower thought, dude.
Jk
I will add, of all the things, alarm clocks seem like they deserved it the least. They did one thing and they were fine at it.
Fine is the right term for this. The alarm clocks were not great, not terrible. They were just fine.
You couldn’t adjust the sound volume or the sound they make. In the later years of alarm clocks, you did have some fancy lamp-radio-alarm-hybrid devices that did have some settings. However, they were woefully inadequate for my needs, so I was stuck with a solution that was nothing more than fine.
Enter mobile phones and their ability to play any mp3 file. My life changed! I made a custom sound that starts gently instead of jumping straight to the RUN OR DIE -stage we’ve sadly grown accustomed to in the past decades. IMO a mobile phone alarm is orders of magnitude superior to any alarm clock I’ve ever seen.
I fucking love alarm clocks. Why? My phone used to be the very first and the very last thing I touch every day. As soon as I unlock my phone, it becomes hard to not get distracted and do other stuff on it. Now, I can have phoneless mornings and evenings.
Good idea. What sound do you use, just out of curiosity?
VNV Nation - Prelude
VNV Nation - Prelude
Nice. I can see how that’d work. I might have to steal the idea.
i wonder what everyone else is using… and which alarm apps lets you have a playlist instead of a single song
My default android alam let’s you use a Spotify playlist. Sadly not with local music tho
Over the years I’ve had a bunch of different gentle alarm sounds. Most of them were nature sounds I edited myself. For example, once I had an owl sound that started from zero volume, but ramped up very gradually.
However, now that I use an iPhone, it hasn’t been very easy to do that. Making a custom ringtone is just stupidly convoluted, and making a custom alarm seems to be completely impossible. I need to look into that, because I really miss my great alarm sounds. The default sounds are all trash.
I remember adding some back in the day, and to this day, they are still available even though I switched from the iPhone 7 I had to the 13. I know you have to do it through iTunes, but that is all that I remember. :(
If you use the normal alarm feature, it’s possible to use custom sounds. However, if you use the sleep schedule from health, you’re stuck with the default sounds instead.
Oh, you are exactly right! I never used the sleep schedule for this exact reason! I need that nuclear meltdown alarm, or I am not waking up! xD
I’ve had an iHome alarm clock at my bedside since 2005. It has a dock for an iPod and a utility plug for other audio devices. Many other brands of alarm clock have utility plugs for audio input as well. Phone different? Yes. Superior? No.
They did one thing and they were fine at it.
so were radios, calculators, landline phones etc
You right. I don’t need to argue. I will elaborate, if that’s OK.
So radios:
I love the old am/fms super neat. Come in all shapes and sizes. By the time I was oldenough, though, they had “boom boxes”. Boom box wanted to give you speakers that you could blast through the house, CD tray, cassette player, cassette recorder, microphone jack. I’m more then happy to trade in the boom box for a phone and set of Bluetooth headphones.
Calculators:
The times you need a calculator you don’t have one. If you did, it was garbage. No one’s packing a ti-87 all day everyday. Not to say there wasn’t really nice pocket calculators, just i never got much use out of them.
Landline:
Miss them. Have memories of using my grandparents rotary phone. Just, by the time I was old enough, no point in having two phones. At least for me.
I’m not looking to argue either, I’m just trying to share how I see things, so this feels more like a discussion to me.
I mean yeah, I don’t think anyone can argue against the convenience of modern technology. I just think we’d be fine without smartphones.
Instead of a boom box or a radio (which weren’t really meant to be portable anyways) you could use an mp3 player, by now they’d probably have Bluetooth as well.
I know some people who carry around dedicated calculators despite having a smartphone, so I think if you need it somewhat regularly, you’d just have it with you. And if you don’t have it with you, your calculations are probably not that important and urgent, so you could do them at home if necessary.
Regarding landlines, there’s barely any situation where I feel the need to contact someone right in that moment, so a landline with a voicemail would be fine most of the time.
Long story short, all I’m trying to say is that smartphones have replaced a lot of things that were fine, not just alarm clocks, and I don’t see why they ‘deserved it the least’. I do understand that I can’t expect a shower thought to go that deep though.
No, like I said to start. You’re right. Thanks for sharing your perspective with me.
Thank you for doing the same :)
This is true. Looking more broadly there’s a bunch of industries that have been affected by smart phones.
Here’s just some of the devices you no longer need thanks to I-phone / Androids:
Strictly speaking the replacement for the gameboy is not iPhone / Android.
It’s the Switch / PSP / other similar handheld consoles.
I would love to have that red phone with the number dial though, for decorative purposes :)
Phones are powerful enough to emulate those devices via software
Hard to get a game of bones going with just a smart phone.
I’m sure there’s a dice app that adds the “clickity clack” effects. After that it’s practically the same lol.
About a year ago I got one of those alarm clocks that slowly light up to simulate the sun rise, and that’s been a game changer. I wake up so much easier and feel less groggy when I do.
Highly recommend
Also highly recommend gradual nature sound alarm sounds like birds and stuff. Wake up way less grumpy.
me and the rest of the ADHD gang keeping the alarm clock market on life support because a phone alarm is too easy to turn off in your sleep:
Plus keeping the phone far from bed is always a good idea.
I can’t sleep with an alarm clock because my ADHD causes me to always want to look at the time if it’s in immediate view
have you tried blocking the view of the clock with a Mountain of Pillows™?
maybe worth a shot, but I feel like I would impulsively “need” to look still, and end up looking over the Mountain o’ Pillows
fair, fair
i wish you whatever your equivalent of Pillow Mountain is that helps you find sleep success! :]
Warning: alarm may not be audible when it inevitably slips under pillows or between mattress and wall.
lol that’s how i lost track of the battery powered alarm last time
Just put it face down on the night stand?
I keep my phone on the opposite side of the room so I can’t turn off the alarm without getting out of bed.
I used to have an alarm app that forced me to scan a barcode to turn it off (I used my shampoo bottle)
guess who learned how to force power off their phone without waking up 🤪
in the end I’ve found my ability to wake up has improved significantly after treating acid reflux (unsurprisingly it fucks up your sleep) and, to some extent, treating the ADHD
I have never trusted my cell phone as an alarm due to my anxiety of if I set the volume correctly or not. I’m rocking my Sony Dream Machine that’s got to be over 20 years old now. Works perfectly, would recommend.
Nice =)
The one alarm clock I’ll never forget was my brother’s promo Surge alarm clock. It would just scream “SURGE” when it went off.
The ideal Surge alarm clock would be an IV that at the right time injects caffeine and sugar directly into your veins.
Lol
I understand your concern, but every app should now have volume override. My native Android alarm and Alarm Clock Extreme has worked flawlessly for years despite my phone always on vibrate. Extreme makes me do math or a captcha before dismissing
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My dad is still using his same one from the
70s80s as far as i know. Yeah you know the one.MREET! MREET! MREET! MREET!
The analog one with 2 bells that never keeps accurate time? Or the horizontal one with the radio and the flappy, rolodex-shaped parts that display the time?
Got the truncated version without the radio, just the clock half, faux wood grain, all that. Took me awhile to land the perfect one at a thrift store, but it should last until Ragnarök.
For the alarm part, “Hey Google, set alarm to $x.” (I mounted minis in all my ceilings for convenience and music.)
I just use my watch
I wish I would have kept my Garfield alarm clock. “Nahhhhh, don’t get up, sleep longer”. Hated getting up, but loved that thing.
The Smartphone Wars, when Nokia bombardments were a daily reality! Rough times…
That’s also how the alarm clocks were wiped out! It was a massacre…
I’m just thankful we were able to negotiate peace. Though, we could have done better the data plan.
We got really lucky the RAZRs were personable and took pity on us, the data plan was a reasonable compromise at the time… It was either that, or those barely functional Sony nav nubs for everyone, and that would’ve been assured extinction!
Motorola will rise again!!!
OMG that ringtone is stuck in my head now.
Yes, that was their incoming shriek, you’d hear a Doppler of the Nokia ringtone, then it started raining bricks!
I just got a new alarm clock and haven’t used my phone since. It’s a bit unreliable, doesnt have a snooze function, and the sound is a shrill cry, but I love her anyway.
All I want is a reliable alarm clock that isnt a fucking app or sony’s bizarre “dream machine” that can’t fucking keep time.
I have a Sony Dream Machine CD clock radio. I can wake up to CD’s. It’s pretty cool. I hope it lasts forever.
Narriator: It broke the next day.
I would actually cry
I am also rocking a dream machine, mine however does not play CDs just Am/FM, which is perfectly acceptable for alarm duty.
I have that clock that projects the time onto the ceiling. It’s the best!
Me too. Just got it recently. I thought it would be a gimmick and maybe it is. But I love it.
It’s so nice to wake up in the night, barely open one eye, and know what time it is. Once you get used to it, you’ll miss it when you travel. My FIL had a small folding travel one.
You know what I miss? Answering Machines.
I’m tired of voice mail. I want my “voice mail” to live ON the phone and be provided by an app.
I don’t see why this couldn’t be done with an app… though I’m not an app developer… So what do I know.
Modern voicemail isn’t done on device like it was with an answering machine. Instead of your machine picking up, your telecom provider does, so you’re no longer actually receiving a call, they are. Theoretically you could have it pick up a ring before your telecom does, but then you’d have 2 mailboxes and if you’re offline the call would go to your provider’s box.
This is even the case for landlines nowadays. I had to setup a new phone for a lady and Comcast was snagging the call before her machine would. Had to change it to pickup before they did.
You can disable the carrier provided voicemail on some phones
There’s also security sandboxes and stuff in Android which don’t allow interaction with the phone components. You ever notice that there are no apps at all which can record the call you’re on? That’s why. They’ve locked it down so that you don’t have the tools to create such an app in the first place.
Thats not true at all. On a previous android phone I had a voice recorder app. It could also record the screen.
“On a previous android phone”
They’ve been incrementally locking down those features and options (or security holes) over the years. I’ve used Tasker almost from the very first android phone to automate tasks and watched those features it tied into slowly get stripped away or locked down to the point of being useless.
Voice recorder. Not phone call recorder. When I said phone components I’m not talking about the smartphone’s sensors and components. I’m saying the “phone” components which make the smartphone able to receive and make calls. That’s actually a sandboxed environment.
While I never use the alarm function, I love having my bedside alarm clock because it has a projector that puts the time on the ceiling. It’s convenient when your bedside table is lower than your mattress
