It's Time to Break Up With Your Phone at Night—For Good
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If you enjoy staring at your phone until exactly one second before you click off your lamp and close your eyes to sleep, this product is not for you. (Also, seek help?) However, if you are like me, attempting to curate the perfect bedtime space, both psychologically and physically, like an asshole, then you might very well be tempted by what follows. This product, Loftie, is an alarm clock. Seen it, but don't know exactly what it does? Well, it's a clock, with an alarm built in to wake you up each morning. It has a snooze button. But it is more than that. It is a nighttime phone-replacer, a piece of bedside decor, and a sleep machine in one. Let me explain.
Loftie is a big, old-school improvement on your smartphone.
Many people will tell you many things about sleep and how much you suck at it. Unfortunately, those people are usually right; I suck at sleeping, almost as much as I suck at waking up. I tried the whole don't-look-at-your-phone thing before bed, but I had to set alarms, and once I was setting alarms, I was scrolling through baseball Twitter and then watching old Hole performances on YouTube and then getting around to answering some texts, and suddenly it was 45 minutes later and I was wide awake and bathed in blue light. In the morning, I'd hit that snooze button on the iPhone screen about seven times before even acknowledging wakefulness as an option. Habits are hard to break, but Loftie gave me an excuse to change mine. I set the two-phase alarm—switching between multiple urgent-but-ethereal tones, like Gong and Wisdom, to keep me on my toes—through the Loftie app or the clock itself, hide my phone on its charger behind my curtain on the windowsill, and read a damn book before sleeping. In the morning, I have to reach over to hit the Loftie snooze button, which I get tired of doing after only two snoozes, so I just get up. Psychologically, I'm not sure what's happening, but know I'm intentional about bypassing my phone.
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Loftie's got more to it than alarms.
Loftie packs a lot more than alarms—not in its app, which is pretty rudimentary, but downloaded into the alarm clock itself. Toggle through the menu, and you'll find white noise, brown noise, and blue noise; the sound of a trout run and the sound of cicadas; vibey music and classical music. There's a cool meditation guide, and a breath-work guide, which I tried and loathed, but to each their own. You can Bluetooth connect your phone to the clock to play a Spotify playlist. You can put a sleep timer on any of these sounds so they peter out after an hour, for example. Or you can let the crackling of the campfire play all night, which is what I do, to great calming effect. And that amber light? It's a nightlight. There's more, but you get the idea: Loftie has sleep tools in abundance.
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Loftie will evolve, as you evolve.
This is by no means a perfect device. It was a crowdfunded invention, now a small tech company, and it's still new. It has some user-experience quirks. It isn't as smart as your Google Pixel 6 Pro. But because this device is Wifi-connected and app-bound, it gets regular software updates that address those quirks and add features. For instance, the most recent update included the addition of Pattern sounds, a play-all option for playlists, and a bed signal, which signals you to go the hell to sleep. Drifting off into dreamland is tricky—understatement of the century—but Loftie is trying to stay on top of it. God willing, I will never have to hear that iPhone alarm again.
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Photography by Timothy Mulcare. Prop styling John Olson for Halley Resources.
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