Only Woke Up Because Of The Blue Moon In My Eyes

It’s a little sad to watch the slow, painful death of my alarm clock

Is that why you were late for work yesterday?

In fact, it is.  But only by a few minutes...it wasn't so bad.  

Downright refreshing for some of us.

So what appears to be happening is the power amplifier of my alarm clock is dying for some unknown reason.  The electronics all work fine, but the final output, in terms of sound, is an ever-decreasing amount of sound.  Sure, the left channel speakers haven't worked in some time (which makes for remarkably interesting music when the radio station plays Bohemian Rhapsody in the morning), but I assume this is an unrelated event.  So yesterday, my alarm clock started playing it's little beeping noises, but the volume was so low, I didn't notice it for like 20 minutes.  I turned up the volume, but the output today was less than was expected.  I fully expect the sound output to be zero within the next couple of days.  This is a bad thing as far as alarm clocks are concerned.  So, I set out on my quest to procure a new alarm clock.  This is so much worse than you might expect.  

You see, my current alarm clock is so much more than an alarm clock.  It's all fancy and stuff.  It not only has a "Gentle Wake" feature so the beeping starts at a low volume and slowly increases until you wake up, but is also has a "Weekend Sleeper" function which can be set to automatically not go off on Saturday and Sunday.  It had a pleasant blue face which was not annoying while sleeping, it had a CD player which I even used like twice, and it actually had totally decent sound for a small radio.  It was a good and faithful multi-featured alarm clock.  People don't make these anymore. 

As I'm quickly finding out, electronics companies have realized that a lot of people simply use their smartphones as alarm clocks now, so the options in terms of clock radios are fairly slim.  Many of the upper-echelon clock radios out there are made to be compatible with iPhones, which I don't have.  At least partially because all of these radios use Apple's moronic proprietary connecter which just changed last year, so any iPhone-compatible clock radio you bought before the even more moronic "Lightning Connector" is now useless.  You have to buy a new radio to be compatible with the new phone you just bought because Apple is too greedy to/can't be bothered to use a universal dock.  All of these clock radios are out. 

Also available are clock radios with a USB connection for those of us with Android phones or any other device which uses USB.  This would seem to be the way to go, except that most don't actually connect your device to the amplifier using the USB...they're simply charging connections.  Also, very few of these have built-in radios, so regardless, you're relying on your cell phone for virtually all of the audio functions of the unit.  

I just want an alarm clock that can charge my phone, connect to it to play music if I want, have a radio if I want that, has decent sound so I can listen to the aforementioned radio while I get ready for work, has two different alarm settings, a gentle-wake feature and an automatic weekend mode.  This is clearly too much to ask, because I've been searching for a day and a half now and have found precisely bupkus.