I haven't needed an alarm clock since 2005 when I had my first child. Once or twice a year I need to catch a crazy early flight that requires me to get up even before my firstborn awakes. In those cases the ONLY feature (beyond going off at the right time) that matters to me is absolutely minimum noise of the alarm and no chance of any idiotic 'snooze' feature that suddenly kicks in again when I thought I had managed to get out of bed without waking everybody else.