iPhone users may have to part with their cash to use Apple’s new AI-powered Apple Intelligence features, according to new reports. The suggestion is that the Cupertino tech giant could tie Apple Intelligence into its Apple One subscription plan or as its own service with a monthly fee between $10-20. Either way, it’s possible genmoji won’t be free forever.
The speculation surrounding a fee for Apple Intelligence is courtesy of Counterpoint Research’s Neil Shah, via 9to5mac. Shah suggests that Apple might pass some of the financial burden of AI-powered features onto consumers while estimating the $10-20 pricing we mentioned earlier. However, he doesn’t seem to think this includes all the Apple Intelligence features, just the “premium” ones. The only problem is that we don’t know which AI features Apple deems premium.
There’s plenty of industry hype around the arrival of Apple Intelligence, despite recent news that Apple is delaying its launch until after the iPhone 16’s big reveal in September. However, there was no mention of a price plan during the big reveal of the AI features during WWDC 2024, so the new speculation surrounding a subscription fee is slightly disappointing, potentially scaring users off before even trying Apple Intelligence.
It’s worth pointing out that while Samsung, Apple’s biggest competitor, doesn’t currently charge for its Galaxy AI features, that could soon change. While the brand has committed to free Galaxy AI for the best Samsung phones until the end of 2025, it hasn’t elaborated on what comes after, leading many to believe that we’ll see an AI paywall in 2026. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple holds off until 2026 to see how much consumers value Apple Intelligence access.
Of course, this is all speculation at the time of writing. Given that all our pre-launch reporting suggests there’s not much in the way of meaningful hardware updates for the iPhone 16 series compared to the other best 5G phones of 2024, we expect Apple to use Apple Intelligence as a primary selling point. With that in mind, it wouldn’t make much sense to immediately slap a fee on the AI features before users even find out if they think it’s worth it. Still, we’re talking about Apple, so anything is possible.