Leave it to Nintendo to cheer up fans already excited about the upcoming Switch 2 reveal by announcing a fancy alarm clock instead. Alarmo wakes you up with the sounds of Mario coins and chirping Pikmin. It costs $100, works best when you’re sleeping alone, and it’s destroying the internet’s collective brain.
It ticks all the boxes: bizarre, eccentric, unnecessarily expensive and bizarrely timed. For weeks, ever since Nintendo skipped its traditional September presentation, there has been background talk suggesting that there would finally be official Switch 2 news any day now. Instead, the company introduced Alarmo without batting an eyelid. The pre-orders went online and are already sold out. Of course, some people are trying to sell Alarmo, which won’t ship until 2025. for almost double the standard price on eBay.
But the funniest thing about Alarmo is that it doesn’t work well for couples. The sensor that turns off the watch when you get out of bed cannot detect whether two people are sleeping together. “Alarmo cannot recognize a specific person. So if there are multiple people sleeping in the same bed within range of the sensor, the alarm may stop when one person leaves the bed, but start again when it detects that someone else is in the bed. ” reads the FAQ. “The alarm goes completely silent once everyone is out of bed.”
Sounds like fun. The Internet agrees and responds to the watch’s issues with couples, their names, the time of the announcement and more:
There’s even an official question and answer session with designers Yosuke Tamori and Tetsuya Akama about how the device came to be. There Are four separate Parts! Essentially, the experiment began with the goal of finding a new application for the company’s motion sensor technology. And while you might expect a Nintendo watch to include gaming elements, they ultimately decided against it because they didn’t want to disrupt the normal incentives around sleep through gamification.
But during testing, there was an Alarmo prototype in which people appeared to make a smacking gesture to the rhythm of the clock chirping. It beeped every time sounds like it’s over Rhythm heaven. REST IN PEACE.
