The iPhone 15 Pro was unveiled at a new product launch event at Apple’s headquarters. … [+]
Apple has been clear about the price of the Apple Intelligence AI features debuting on the iPhone 16: it’s free. It remains to be seen how long the free period will last, or whether there will be an asterisk attached to the free period.
Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, said: CNBC Apple could charge $10 to $20 per month for Apple Intelligence, possibly as part of its Apple One subscription service.
“Software and services make it more advantageous for Apple to pass that on through the Apple One subscription model,” Shah explained.
AI is costly to develop and maintain, but Shah correctly points out that subscription revenue is too big a boon for tech companies to overlook. Google already charges $19.99 a month for access to its Google One AI Premium plan, which bundles Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage. UK subscribers also get free access to Nest Aware and Fitbit Premium.
ChatGPT has a premium tier, and Samsung has repeatedly warned users that Galaxy AI won’t be free until 2025. The infrastructure is in place to allow these companies to charge for access to their cutting-edge software, and given the billions of dollars already spent building these language models and the ongoing costs of maintaining them, they need to recoup their funding.
But the question for these companies is whether their current AI tools are good enough to justify charging for them, and looking at the current lineup of AI tools from all the major smartphone manufacturers, I would say they’re not.
There’s no compelling reason to pay extra for writing tools, Genmoji, voice-to-text, web page summaries, or a smarter Siri. Same goes for Galaxy AI and Gemini, which are useful and improve your smartphone experience. I frequently turn to Gemini for help, and am often impressed with the generative image editing and call transcription.
But adding another direct debit to my current stack just isn’t worth it – I’m used to non-AI enabled smartphones and have enough experience with them to get over the FOMO.
That’s why I don’t see Apple changing its decision to charge for Apple Intelligence anytime soon — there’s no compelling reason to do so. AI is a shiny new trend, but there are signs that people are losing trust in the technology. Charging for features that were previously free could further alienate people from a technology they already dislike.
There’s also a game of chicken being played between Samsung, Google and Apple over AI tools. Whoever decides to charge first could face a public backlash that will influence their rivals’ decisions. These AI features are also very similar, so why would iPhone users pay for call transcriptions when Samsung users don’t have to?
Google has offered free AI tools through its Pixel Feature Drop program since 2019, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. The only paid version of the company’s AI tech is for a very specialized version of the more advanced Gemini language model, and there’s an extra charge if you want to store more Magic Editor cloud saves beyond the 10 monthly allowance it’s designed for.
But the everyday AI-powered features of the Pixel remain free, and best of all, while skills like Call Screen and Photomoji are AI-inspired, at the end of the day, they’re still just smartphone features.
Where do you draw the line between a normal feature upgrade in a new OS update and something that you have to pay for because it’s “AI”? And how do you do that without alienating users who are already paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for top-of-the-line hardware alongside their existing subscriptions with the company?
While charging for AI tools may make economic sense, since the technology costs billions of dollars to build and maintain, implementing the plan is complicated: It would require a lot of development work to make these tools worth paying extra for, plus a compelling argument for why they shouldn’t be free.
There are several hurdles to overcome before paid AI feature sets become a reality, which is why Apple Intelligence, Galaxy AI, and Google AI are likely to remain mostly free for the time being.
