What seems like a deliberately vague comment by outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook during the earnings call suggests that heavy Siri AI usage could be more expensive than we’ve so far expected.
While it had always seemed clear that we wouldn’t be able to make unlimited use of Siri AI without paying for it in some way, Cook’s remarks do appear to point to some bad news …
What we already knew
Apple aims to do as much AI processing as possible on device, which has the twin benefits of maximizing user privacy while allowing Apple to avoid AI server costs on these tasks. However, there will be tasks that need to be run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, and yet others that will require the use of Google Gemini servers.
That server usage of course costs Apple money, so it had always seemed clear that the company would be applying the same freemium strategy to Siri AI as other companies do to their chatbots: limited usage for free, with heavier users requiring a monthly subscription.
So far, however, it has generally been assumed that getting access to Siri AI would simply require an iCloud+ subscription, and it also seemed possible that usage limits might be tied to the iCloud+ tier – so a 50GB plan might come with one limit, a 200GB plan a higher one, and a 2TB plan a higher one yet.
That would mean that many of us would effectively get heavier Siri AI usage thrown into our existing iCloud+ plan.
But we may have to pay more
Cook was asked about this by Goldman Sachs during the earnings call.
How does the Apple Intelligence usage to date in the open beta inform how you’re thinking about compute costs and the ability to recover some of those costs through iCloud+.
His reply seemed to go beyond simply noting that an iCloud+ subscription would be required:
In terms of what it means for compute cost, it’s obviously early going for us, and so I don’t want to say that we have a complete plan for that. We do believe there will be people that want to use it a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+ where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is.
One reading of that is that heavier Siri AI usage won’t just require an iCloud+ subscription, but that it will be an add-on cost. In other words, the subscription doesn’t automatically give us higher usage limits, only access to the ability to purchase an add-on to bump up those limits.
The language is vague, so it may not mean that. However, if Cook simply wanted to say that higher usage limits come with iCloud+ subscriptions, then I would have expected him to state that more clearly. The very fact that his language is vague is what makes me suspect that the news may be bad – or at the very least take him at his word that the company hasn’t yet decided, but is considering the add-on route.
Of course, none of this means very much until we get a sense of how much we are using Siri AI and at what point we are likely to hit usage limits. It might be that, even if my suspicions are correct, it’s not something that would affect the majority of Apple users. However, if we use existing AI chatbots as examples, most of us who have found them useful for more than the occasional task have indeed needed to purchase a subscription.
What are your views? Do you share my suspicions about what Cook’s phrasing may imply? If so, do you think you are likely to find it worthwhile to pay for Siri AI usage? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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