Traditionally, alarm clocks let you snooze for nine extra minutes — and there’s a surprisingly practical, historical reason for that. When GE-Telechron released the Snooz Alarm in 1956, the first alarm clock with a snooze feature, the clock’s mechanical design wouldn’t allow for a 10-minute extension. The gears lined up perfectly only after nine minutes, and engineers decided that was close enough.
It also turned out to be useful: falling back into deep sleep usually takes around 10 minutes, so nine minutes helped prevent oversleeping. Since then, nine has become the magic number, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.
With iOS 26, Apple has introduced a more flexible snooze setting, allowing you to choose any interval between one and 15 minutes — so you can finally tailor your wake-up routine to suit you. Here’s how to do it.
1. Open Clock app
You’ll need to set the snooze duration for each alarm individually, as there’s no universal setting that applies to all of them. By default, every alarm is set to nine minutes, but changing it is easy.
To start, launch the Clock app on your iPhone and select the Alarms tab at the bottom of the screen
2. Choose an alarm
You can eithe tap an existing alarm to edit it, or if you wish to start fresh with a new alarm, tap + in the top-right corner of the screen.
3. Activate Snooze
You can now set the time you wish the alarm to sound and decide how often you want this alarm to go off. Crucially, to make use of the snooze function, you need to toggle the Snooze button so that it turns green.
4. Change the duration
Next, tap Snooze Duration. To reiterate, this will be nine minutes by default. Now use the carousel to change the duration from one to 15 minutes. When you're happy with the duration, tap the orange button in the top-right corner.
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