Crystal Ball Turns Your Apple Watch Into a Bedside Alarm Clock

Complain if you want about the Apple Watch’s boxy design, but it facilitates one of the wearable’s best low-key features: propping it up and using it as a bedside alarm clock. The screen’s a little small, but that’s now easily solved with a clever Apple Watch charging dock that uses a polished lucite orb to magnify the screen.

The NightWatch itself is about as low-tech an Apple Watch accessory as you’re going to find, and yet it manages to considerably improve the functionality of the wearable. Made from a single block of lucite—a fancier way of saying plexiglass—the dock’s elegant design not only magnifies the Apple Watch’s screen, it also features carved channels on the underside designed to direct and amplify sounds from the watch out the front, reducing the risk of a user sleeping through a blaring alarm.

At night the Apple Watch is simply dropped into a slot behind the dock’s half-orb, where it also magnetically attaches to the charger that Apple includes with the wearable. That’s about the extent of how to set it up and use it. The only real downside we can see to the NightWatch is that because the lucite is “hand-polished to a mirror finish” the dock is going to cost you $50, which isn’t cheap. It also potentially poses the same risks as crystal balls do, in that anything that can magnify light can also focus it. Users might want to ensure they close the bedroom curtains during the day so an errant ray of sunlight doesn’t cross paths with the orb and end up sparking bigger problems than a screen that’s hard to see at night.