Look ma, no hands! Jony Ive's design firm invents a hands-free, hard-to-read, costly clock — but it plays sounds, too, at least!

• Jony Ive's design company created a bedside clock with illuminated digits instead of hands
• Inspired by pocket watches, but considerably more chunky
• Available in Japan for around $373 / £279 / AU$529

Former Apple design chief Jonathan Ive's new firm LoveFrom has designed a new luxury product: a clock called The Clock.

Inspired by old-fashioned pocket watches and made by Japanese brand Balmuda, The Clock joins Balmuda's other luxury products including The Brew coffee maker, The Speaker wireless speaker and The Kettle electric kettle.

According to Balmuda, "we wanted to do more than just display the time; we wanted to make time itself a pleasant experience." And to do that, the firms have collaborated on an analog clock that doesn't have any hands.

What is The Clock by Jonathan Ive?

Rather than use hands to show the time, The Clock uses LEDs in a system that Balmuda calls the "Light Hour". It illuminates the digit for the hour and then lights up tick marks around the circumference of the face to show the minutes. Another tick becomes the seconds hand, moving around the display.

Jony Ive really likes aluminum (or aluminium, as he proudly pronounced it throughout his Apple years despite the accent pressure all around him) and here he's used an aluminum unibody case for The Clock, just like so many of his Apple creations.

It's 7.5cm wide and tall, and weighs just under 260g, and it charges via USB-C. Apple Magic Mouse users will be relieved to see that The Clock's USB-C port is on the back rather than underneath, so you can still see the time as its 24-hour battery recharges. And yes, 24 hours seems a bit short for a clock battery to last to us as well.

In addition to the time display, The Clock also features ambient soundtracks composed specifically for The Clock's Relax Time mode, including "the sound of rain, the rumble of a boat on a river, and the crackling of a lodge fireplace" played with "astonishing realism."

International pricing hasn't been announced but The Clock is currently available in Japan for around $373 / £279 / AU$529.

According to Gen Terao, Balmuda CEO, The Clock was designed to solve a personal problem. Listening to rain sounds on his phone as he tried to get to sleep, he "started to wonder if having these social devices by my bedside might be related to my sleep. And then it occurred to me: Wouldn't it be great to have a personal clock made with modern technology that plays the gentle sound of rain, a really nice sound to fall asleep to?"

The movement of the second hand illumination was apparently based on Foucault's pendulum in the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the moving lights during Relax Time soundtracks were "inspired by the flickering lights of distant cities and the twinkling of stars."

It's nice that Terao found a solution to his concerns, but I find The Clock's design a step backwards in terms of readability: for me at least it's slower to read than a traditional clock face and I suspect that the choice of white illumination on a light-colored aluminum face is going to be hard to see in even mildly bright sunlight.

That said, I'm not the target audience for The Clock: I much prefer (and own) Braun clocks inspired by the designs of Ive's idol Dieter Rams, such as the Braun BC02 and the Classic wall clock. Braun's cute Classic travel clocks are less than one-tenth of the cost of The Clock – and the price includes a sturdy set of good old-fashioned hands.

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