Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users
TechCrunch Amanda Silberling ● Covered by 3 sources
Apple's outgoing CEO says heavy Siri AI users might have to pay extra through iCloud+. It's the clearest sign yet that Apple's late, expensive AI push needs a revenue plan.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Tim Cook used his last earnings call as Apple's chief executive to drop a small but telling detail about the company's revamped Siri. Power users of the new Siri AI, he said Thursday, may eventually need to pay up. The plan, still loose, would let people buy additional compute through iCloud+, the subscription tier that currently just sells extra cloud storage.
Cook was careful to hedge, saying nothing is finalized and that Apple wants to see how demand shakes out before locking in pricing. But the direction is unmistakable, and it puts Apple in the same camp as Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which cap free usage and charge for the heavier stuff. For a company that has spent decades selling hardware with software bundled in for free, that's a real shift in posture.
The context here matters. Apple's AI ambitions have been a mess for over a year. The Siri overhaul is arriving so late that Apple had to pay $250 million to settle a lawsuit over how it advertised the iPhone 16's AI features in the first place. Along the way, Apple also swallowed some pride and licensed a custom Gemini model from Google to prop up Siri, an admission that its in-house AI simply wasn't ready. The improved Siri is now live in the iOS 27 beta, with a wider rollout expected this fall.
John Ternus, Apple's longtime hardware chief, takes over as CEO right as all of this comes to a head. He inherits not just an AI product playing catch-up, but a supply chain squeezed by an industry-wide RAM shortage that's pushing up manufacturing costs everywhere. Meta, Samsung, Microsoft, and Sony have already raised device prices in response. Apple bumped up Mac and iPad pricing last month, though iPhones have so far been spared.
So Ternus starts the job managing two pressures at once: a Siri product that arrived years late and now needs to somehow monetize itself, and a hardware cost structure that's getting less forgiving by the month. Charging for extra AI compute won't fix either problem outright, but it does give Apple a lever to pull if margins get tight.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Charging iPhone owners extra to actually use the AI feature Apple already got sued for overpromising feels like a special kind of chutzpah, and I don't think loyalty alone will make people swallow it quietly. Apple built its brand on things just working, included, no upsell — this is Apple admitting AI compute is too expensive to give away, which says more about the economics of AI right now than anything about Siri itself.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch