GoKawiilWhat 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+.
... continue reading