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It comes with other benefits as well. Not even the cheapest alarm clock has ever failed me. Sure, it can run out of battery power but the low power icon shows up months before it runs out of juice. Phone alarms on the other hand? I had them not triggering at all, or the vibration motor in the phone being stuck (?) and thus not working temporarily, etc... Hence I also prefer physical alarm clocks without software that have one job and one job only.


I've had strange time issues lately with iOS and macOS.

Initially I thought it was a TZ issue because of automatic location but the offset ended up being inconsistent with any TZ. Looks like a mix of RTC and NTP issue, the latter hiding the former when it works but revealing it when it fails.

Luckily I don't use alarms on my phone.


Not really relevant but I'm going to say it anyway. I hate devices that tell me about "low" battery long in advance of actually going flat, it simply trains me to ignore the notification and then it unceremoniously dies on me at a later time.


In this particular case it's my use of NiMH batteries, which have a different discharge slope than normal Alkaline batteries. So it's not really a "feature" of the device but rather a limitation of the type of batteries used. With my alarm clock the signs when to charge the batteries are very obvious (the LCD starts fading away so it becomes hard to read, but the device is still functioning perfectly for some more weeks even then - it just doesn't much power at all).


curious: why do alarm clocks run on batteries? Seems counter intuitive for a device that is just going to sit in one place to not be plugged in?


I've been using mine as a travel clock many times. Why have two items when both do the same thing?


Its a difficult problem to estimate remaining battery life with alkaline batteries. Devices can only use the voltage reading to make estimates.




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