If you’re an iPhone owner who likes to eke out every last second of your night’s sleep, you may well have wondered why the phone’s snooze intervals are always set to nine minutes.
Why, exactly, would they make it nine minutes? Surely ten is more logical? Perhaps even five?
In actual fact, Apple have set their snooze setting at nine minutes as a tribute to times gone by. Literally.
Before digital time ever existed, some analogue clocks also had their own snooze option.
As you can imagine, it was quite a complex thing to sort out – with the snooze button needing to be attached to the part of the clock which regulated the minutes.
According to this answer on Quora (which goes into precise detail), the most straightforward way to engineer this and give people the longest possible snooze time was to set it for nine minutes.
As a result, snooze time became widely accepted as something that should last nine minutes – a point now recognised by Apple.
