GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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With the public release of iOS 27 and tvOS 27, Apple Home is getting an injection of Apple Intelligence — but you’ll have to pay more for it.
Apple Intelligence for Home brings AI-powered video summaries to HomeKit Secure Video, so you can get short text descriptions of who and what compatible security cameras saw, along with the clip. It also adds a new video search feature and the ability to stitch footage from multiple cameras into one clip, making it easier to keep an eye on what’s happening around your home without scrolling through footage.
AI-generated video summaries provide text descriptions of what a camera sees.
But to get these features, you’ll need to pay $9.99 a month for the 2TB iCloud Plus plan (or $39.95 a month for an Apple One Premier subscription) — and that’s just for one camera. According to an Apple support page, to add Apple Intelligence to a second camera, you’ll have to pay $29.99 a month for the 6TB plan. For up to five cameras, it’s a whopping $59.99 a month for the 12TB plan. No word on whether you can add more than five cameras. (Recordings from HomeKit-connected cameras don’t count toward your storage quota.)
That’s way too expensive. While the improved video features are useful — I’ve been testing them in beta and have been impressed — they’re not good enough to justify that big a price jump.
HomeKit Secure Video has always been behind a paywall, but it started at a very reasonable $1 a month. That’s for the 50GB iCloud Plus plan, which includes recorded footage from one camera, plus smart alerts and facial recognition. For more cameras, you bump up to 2TB / $9.99 a month (up to five), and 6TB / $29.99 a month or higher for unlimited cameras. But the cost for the Apple Intelligence features is a huge increase.
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