It's obviously speculation, and repeated at that, but a new report argues that it's more likely that Apple will eventually charge a fee for Siri Ai now that Apple Intelligence has improved so much.
Apple has long been predicted to introduce a subscription version of Apple Intelligence, and a new report chiefly repeats speculation from 2024. However, the new claim comes after the launch of Siri AI in beta, and Bloomberg's Power On newsletter argues that it has made subscriptions more likely.
That's because even in beta form, the new Siri AI is described as adequate now, and will clearly improve in the future. The speculation is that over the next 12 months, the feature will improve enough, and become popular enough, that a subscription version could be a success.
Then, too, Apple is shouldering the high costs of AI features such as Image Playground and Siri conversations. That must add to the pressure to get users to pay for their usage.
As a consequence, the report predicts that conversations and image generation will move to a paid tier. There is already the fact that Apple has already said that iCloud+ subscribers can get a higher daily usage of both of these.
Then World Knowledge might become a subscription feature, although at present this is the weakest part of the new Siri AI. Apple has the great benefit that Siri AI is part of its devices' operating systems, but it has the strong disadvantage that it let Siri get dramatically poorer while it worked on this new version.
So Apple has to get back users who've given up on Siri before, plus it has to attract new users. If it cannot do that and also improve Siri AI, Apple would not be able to launch a separate Apple Intelligence subscription.
That said, it could add Apple Intelligence features to its Apple One bundle. That has hardly changed its offering since it launched in 2020, so perhaps Apple Intelligence could be a way to boost sales of that bundle.
