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This Is Why The Snooze On iPhones Lasts For Nine Minutes

This Is Why The Snooze On iPhones Lasts For Nine Minutes

Just make it ten.

Mark McGowan

Mark McGowan

There are quite a few small things that really bug us.

How many people can't stand volume being on an odd number? Fucking awful, isn't it? It's little things like this that can really make you uncomfortable, and if it's not within your power to change it, but you still know it's there, it's soul destroying.

For people that find the volume number niggling, you probably find iPhone's snooze time a small annoyance, too.

Waking up to the sound of your alarm usually results in you saying 'fuck that,' and hitting the snooze button, prompting a message which tells you there's nine minutes until it goes off again.

Nine? Why not ten? It's just as bad as when something costs 99p. Just make it a quid. ROUND IT UP.

However, there is method to the madness.

According to iOS support expert Nic Lake on a Quora thread, the reason is because of old clocks, on which it was tough to set alarms for exact times.

"Early clocks and watches had gears that made it difficult to set a snooze for exactly ten minutes," he wrote. "So they aimed for less than ten minutes, aka 9 minutes. Was a pretty standard thing till the 50s."

Credit: PA

But it's not the 50s, it's 2017, and we're being denied an extra minute in bed because technology back in the day wasn't as good as it is today? Hogwash, in my opinion.

Antique clock collector David J Slavik backs up the notion, however, and sheds a bit more light on why the nine minutes thing is something we simply have to put up with.

"It is my belief that when the first hybrid electric clocks arrived THAT is when a seeming nine minute standard was adopted. These old electric clocks physically flipped cards to indicate the time," he writes. "How this is explained is that when the user presses the buttons some number of seconds will have already passed. The snooze function had no way to deal with this and didn't even try.

"So you end up with a function that is almost never quite 10 minutes, never less than or equal to nine."

I say, just round it up.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: iPhone