It would make a terrifying vampire. As the days get shorter and the inevitable clock change looms, I start to feel depressed, limping and disoriented. While the rest of the country celebrates getting more sleep, I mourn that five months of available daylight hours are about to disappear. That’s why my current obsession with technology isn’t about flashy new iPhones, wacky handheld consoles, or amazing headsets. A sunrise alarm clock. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t exactly a romance.
The particular sunrise alarm clock I own doesn’t remind me at all of a time when people still thought digital clocks were a very good idea. But it’s nothing new. My wife gifted me a Lumie many years ago. From a functional standpoint, it’s working well.
Half an hour before you have to wake up, the room gradually gets brighter. Saying you’re simulating a sunrise is like VROOOMing a toy car on your desk and claiming you’re simulating a Grand Prix. But hey, it does the job. It’s much better than being jolted awake by an alarm that leaves you in a daze for months when the sun doesn’t shine through the curtains.
weekend blues
except on weekends. Because the person who designed this, and I use the word “designed” loosely, never thought of the radical concept of a weekend lie-in. On Saturday, you have two options. The first is to not activate Lumie the night before and wake up in the dark and spend the day feeling like a zombie. Even more than usual. The other is fiddling with settings and wrestling with interfaces created by people who don’t understand that real humans need to interact with technology. It’s irritating in the same way that water is wet. The situation becomes even worse when there is a power outage and all settings are lost.
So I came up with a cunning plan to upgrade my sunrise alarm clock. I don’t feel bad about this since mine is very old and uses incandescent bulbs which are almost impossible to get power to once the bulb burns out. Sure, this technology has evolved over the years, I thought. I found this so advanced that with just an extra 30 minutes of thinking in bed, I could instantly reconstruct a virtual sunrise while planning with my kitchen appliances to make my favorite breakfast the next morning. I imagined that he would. Apparently not.
false dawn
What I’ve discovered is that, ironically, this niche corner of the tech industry seems to be stuck in the dark ages. Interfaces are now more forgiving than the calculators of the 1980s. I combed through pages about the latest sunrise alarms. Lumie is still effective, but I need a mid-range option before I can get multiple alarms. 2024. Forget about technology integration. The most expensive models do not have Bluetooth.
Rumi is not alone. Philips’ range is in similar territory, but the design avoids Lumie’s “half orb” vibe and instead aims for a “fallen light bulb”. Except for “SmartSleep,” which is somewhere between an art installation, a British confectionery, and a fetish object. Several other brands have entered the app space, promising granular control. However, customer reviews scream that the app never works properly and the ease of use of the lamp is even worse than everything mentioned so far.
So, I’ll continue to use the sunrise alarm I’m currently using and hope I can get through another winter. Maybe you should collect all your current options, but thing We did a group test and started them all at once with my preference for daylight. The light show was so intense that my neighbors would think a miniature sun had exploded in my bedroom. But at least you’ll feel great at 7:15am.
