After 18 Years, Apple Is Killing Its 9-Minute Snooze—That Can Only Mean One Thing
For years, it's always been nine more measly minutes. If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, you've probably never owned an iPhone, or you're one of those freaks who wakes up without a device screaming in your face to do so. If you are in one of those camps, let me explain: for 18 years, Apple has maintained a vice grip on its alarm snooze feature, which grants nine more minutes to your alarm. No more, no less. Just nine minutes. And there's no adjusting that in settings.
No adjusting that until now, that is. As noted by MacRumors, iOS 26, which was just introduced at Apple's WWDC 2025, finally lets you manually set your snooze time, which means one thing: it's time to sleep the f**k in, at least for as much as 15 whole minutes. In normal, non-sleep-related time, six minutes more isn't a lot, but when it comes to waking up, if you're anything like me, six minutes is basically a lifetime. Imagine all the horrible stress dreams about your teeth falling out you could have had in that time. Or heck, you might even luck out and get the one where you're driving a car and the brakes go out. The possibilities are really endless, or at least endless within a 15-minute span.
Not only that, but you can even—if you're a total masochist—set your snooze time to be shorter. As noted by MacRumors, the developer beta allows you to choose anywhere between one and 15 minutes. The world is now your sleepy little oyster, and you are able to shuck it into the future up to 15 minutes at a time. On one hand, it's kind of wild that it's taken this long to give people the option to extend or retract their snooze times, but also very Apple-like. For many years, Apple was known for its definitive design that locked people in, though that's changed as the years have gone by. In today's iOS, you can change app icons, customize wallpapers, and—soon in iOS 26—choose backgrounds for your threads in Messages, and much more. Those are all things that iOS users of yore only dreamed about, and now they're a reality. It's a shift for Apple, but in this case, probably one that most people will welcome.
As for the 9-minute default, well, it'll still have its place as the iOS default and also its own place in history. The 9-minute snooze, if you'll allow me a quick reverie, is a vestige of alarm clock history, originating from GE's Model 7H241 from 1956, which was the first alarm clock with a snooze feature. Why nine minutes exactly? Well, back in the day, clocks had gears, and that meant you had to work around the physical constraints of said gears. GE wasn't able to set 10 minutes exactly due to those constraints—it had to choose nine minutes and change or 10 minutes and change, and ultimately it went with nine. Clearly that decision lasted a lot longer than nine minutes in the long run.
If you're ready to break out of the 9-minute prison Apple has kept you in, you'll have to wait a little bit, though. Currently, iOS 16 is only available via a developer beta, and the first public beta launches next month. The non-beta software should launch in the fall in full, along with Apple's newest-generation iPhones, and once that happens, we can all rest easy—at least for 15 more minutes.
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