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Now that Apple has begun publicly testing Apple Intelligence features in its iOS 18.1 developer beta, two different analysts who spoke to CNBC are suggesting that Apple might be in a position to charge between $10 and $20 per month for the AI features coming to iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
“Apple is one of the few connected devices companies that has successfully monetized the value-added services it offers,” Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC. “As a result, it has set a precedent with its users that they have to pay for more premium services. On this basis, it can’t be ruled out that Apple may choose to charge for more advanced features within its Apple Intelligence offering.”
In its Q3 earnings, Apple reported $24.4 billion in Services revenue, which is more than its Wearables, Mac, and iPad revenues combined. According to Jason Snell at Six Colors, Apple earned about 74% profit on that revenue, compared to about 35% profit on its hardware products. Paid subscriptions had strong, double-digit growth, per Apple CFO Luca Maestri.
Right now, only a few Apple Intelligence features are available in the iOS 18.1 beta and include things like summarization of notifications, emails, and voice memos; Smart Reply in Apple Mail; and Siri upgrades that provide the assistant with a little more context to ongoing conversations. Apple Intelligence will include image generation with Image Playground and Genmoji, the latter of which will be able to create emoji-like pictures on the fly from text prompts.
OpenAI—which will integrate ChatGPT into Apple's OSes via Apple Intelligence—charges $20 per month for ChatGPT Plus, which offers more messages to ChatGPT and access to features like its generative image creation tool DALL-E. Pro tiers for Perplexity and Microsoft's Copilot are also $20 per month.
Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC that “Apple could charge between $10 and $20 for Apple Intelligence, potentially as part of Apple One, for more premium AI features” because “investment in AI is expensive."
From a market perspective, it makes sense that Apple could eventually incorporate AI features into Apple One. So far, however, the company hasn’t indicated that it intends to charge for Apple Intelligence, except if you need to buy a newer Apple device to try it out.