Once set up correctly it will hover above the base for as long as it is powered, displaying the time and date on digits of glowing metal and glass. Needing no batteries, the nixie clock is powered from the base without wires and will operate without interruption for months or years. No charging is required, it just floats and works.
I think it's a little weird that they went with 5 tubes instead of 6, and are spending a whole tube on punctuation. But it still looks like magic.
See, THIS is the future I was promised.
I suppose that's technically correct, in the same way that my refrigerator needs no batteries.
I also have never replaced a battery in my refrigerator. But my refrigerator does not fucking hover. So I think it's a useful thing to point out.
Perhaps your refrigerator is more performative than mine.
Now I want a hover fridge.
Me too. So I can fill it with eels.
I need this!
I wonder what happens when this rig loses power. Does it just kind of spin to a stop, or does it go shooting off one side? Only one good way to find out, of course ...
"our special no-drop battery backup power supply"
Maybe, when they have the Bluetooth stuff working, (and so a remote computer can update the time settings automatically) it becomes viable.
Until then it's just yet another clock showing the wrong time as some cheap uncalibrated quartz counter gently drifts. Most homes already have too many clocks telling the wrong time as it is.
The best thing about the corners cut in the earliest Squeezeboxes (with the old-fashioned but rather pretty vacuum fluorescent display) is that they are literally too dumb to show the wrong time. If the machine that knows what the actual time is can't reach it or is switched off, the screen soon blanks entirely, leaving you in no danger of relying on a hopelessly wrong clock. It's the only thing in my home that I allow to display the time without itself having any way of knowing if it's right.
The NixieChron I have (see previously) gets its time from GPS. So that's cool.
But i don't really need to know what time it is that much. I wish fewer things had clocks in them in general. Some of them are pretty, though.
I want one!!