Because the first iPhone was launched 18 years in the past, one nagging characteristic has remained that Apple has stubbornly refused to vary: the snooze timer.
The 2007 iPhone launched with solely 17 apps, however the Clock was amongst them. Alarms have been current from the beginning, full with a nap timer that muted the alarm for one more 9 minutes.
That nine-minute snooze hasn’t simply been the default for almost twenty years of iPhone historical past; it’s been a built-in period that may’t be modified — till now.
Apple didn’t point out this throughout its Worldwide Builders Convention (WWDC) keynote on Monday, however it was tucked away within the 6×6 slide of extra options the corporate confirmed, proper within the prime nook: Customized snooze size for alarms.
If there’s one characteristic in iOS 26 that will get a well-deserved “lastly,” it’s this one.
The brand new customized snooze size remains to be restricted to between 1 and quarter-hour, however that ought to be a good sufficient vary for anybody. The excellent news is that it may also be set individually for every alarm.
This contains the Wake Up alarm built-in with Apple’s Sleep characteristic, the place you’ll be able to override it as a one-off for less than the following morning, similar to you’ll be able to with different Wake Up alarm settings. New alarms will nonetheless default to 9 minutes, and there aren’t any settings to vary that — a minimum of not but — however it’s simple to set a distinct one whenever you create a brand new alarm.
The customizable snooze size is already working within the first iOS 26 developer beta, and it’s about so simple as you’d anticipate. The Clock app has lengthy supplied a “Snooze” toggle for alarms, so iOS 26 simply provides an additional Snooze Period setting under that. Faucet on this, select a time, and that’s it.
It’s seemingly such a small factor, and it’s exhausting to imagine it will have taken Apple a lot effort to vary it, however whether or not some engineer or designer was stubbornly holding to custom or just by no means obtained round to it, 9 minutes remained the built-in snooze time for much longer than it ought to have in a digital age.
The 9-Minute Snooze Legacy
Whereas 9 minutes could seem to be an odd quantity, there was a purpose for Apple’s seeming insanity. It stems from the historical past of mechanical alarm clocks, which had a set snooze time because of the gears and cams inside. The geometry of the gears prevented engineers from aligning the tooth for an ideal ten-minute snooze. Since they felt that something longer was an excessive amount of, they settled on the closest interval they might get to the ten-minute mark: 9 minutes.
The notion of 9 minutes was additionally loosely primarily based on an unproven psychological idea generally believed on the time that 9 minutes was the proper interval to fall again into a lightweight sufficient sleep to get up on the subsequent alarm interval. Something longer, designers believed, would threat a deeper sleep that might make it more durable for the particular person to get up once more.
This began within the Nineteen Fifties, and 9 minutes shortly grew to become a de facto trade commonplace, with each mechanical alarm clock designed for a nine-minute snooze, together with the flip-style digital alarm clocks of the Nineteen Sixties. By the Nineteen Seventies, when absolutely solid-state digital clocks got here alongside, the nine-minute snooze had been ingrained in our tradition for almost twenty years, so the designers of the timing chips simply went with the stream — and so did Apple over 30 years later when it launched the primary iPhone.
Though there was some logic to early LED alarm clocks sticking with 9 minutes as these timings have been baked into the {hardware}, there was by no means any purpose for the iPhone to be restricted on this approach aside from custom.
Apple’s penchant for skeuomorphic design seemingly contributed to the choice to stay with the nine-minute snooze. The primary six generations of the iPhone leaned closely on real-world objects like yellow notepads, felt-tipped markers, and leather-bound calendars to provide on a regular basis of us a way of real-world familiarity on the digital gadget, so it’s not exhausting to see the way it might need determined to observe the identical precept with the nine-minute snooze.
Nonetheless, when Apple deserted skeuomorphism in 2013 in favor of a very flat design, that ought to have additionally been the second when different anachronistic traditions have been tossed out the window, but the nine-minute snooze remained, presumably as a result of no one inside Apple gave a lot thought to it.
This 12 months, iOS 26 ushers within the second main design in iPhone historical past, transferring away from a flat design to one thing with extra futuristic depth. Within the course of, Apple has rethought a lot of its redesign, and someplace alongside the best way, it should have occurred to somebody that it’s lastly time to deliver the Clock app into the brand new millennium.