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As described at Apple’s last WWDC conference, Apple Intelligence is meant to be a big revolution in how users interact with their most recent iPhones and Macs. Users won’t need to root through their messages and images to pull up all the necessary information to remind themselves about their mother’s birthday plans. But AI is an expensive endeavor, and those costs have analysts running around in circles. Some suggest Apple should make users pay up to a $20 subscription fee to access the souped-up Siri.
Apple Intelligence is coming in pieces over the course of this and next year. The landmark “semantic” Siri improvements, letting users provide the assistant multi-pronged queries on all aspects of their phones, won’t be here until 2025. And yet, CNBC reported that the Cupertino tech giant is driving speculation on whether it will make users pay for those advanced features. That’s to make up for the enormous costs of deploying AI and crafting its brand-new data centers.
The outlet pointed to researchers at Counterpoint Research and CCS Insight that Apple has plenty of precedent for making users sign up for subscriptions. They surmised it could be a part of Apple One, which is a $20-a-month subscription for multiple services like Apple Music and 2 TB of iCloud storage.
Here’s the thing, Apple has a track record for supplying paid features that should be free and free features that it probably should make users pay for. Take for instance its Emergency SOS feature that first came with the iPhone 14. That service costs Apple money, but it came free for the two years after you first activate an iPhone 14 or iPhone 15 (that practice will presumably continue with iPhone 16). Apple extended that end date for the Emergency SOS by an extra year last November and added roadside assistance via satellite as well. Now Apple’s expanding it with Emergency SOS video calling for iOS 18.
In the same way, Apple Intelligence will need to be free to start, otherwise, it would remain a gate-kept feature that won’t actually entice users to buy an iPhone 15 or iPhone 16—the only two phone lines that will get AI. All the M-series Macs and iPads will have full access to Apple Intelligence when it rolls around, but it’s fair to say both consumers and analysts are most curious to see how it works on iPhones.
Last month, Bloomberg’s Apple sleuth Mark Gurman reported the first few Apple Intelligence features were pushed back to October, rather than arriving at iOS 18’s expected launch in September. Still, users on the iPhone’s dev beta stream have rooted around with the features in its very bare form. Currently, it just means Siri is more conversational, though the beta chatbot is still limited in a number of ways, according to those who have used it.
We don’t have to worry about paying for Apple Intelligence immediately, especially since competitors at Samsung and Google are pushing on-device chatbot features free, for now at least. Google is offering a full year of the most expensive Google One subscription for new Chromebooks, which also gets access to the more advanced Gemini model, but after that users will need to pay. Samsung and Amazon have both mentioned they may need users to pay for AI in the future,
Paying for AI seems inevitable, but it won’t be immediate. These companies are still struggling to sell users on how a chatbot can truly revolutionize their phone experience. So far, none have made a case for why users should care about a bot that can summarize their emails. Perhaps Apple will be the first to crack it, but once users actually want to use it, that’s when we might have to start paying for it.
