Analyst Predicts $20 Monthly Fee for Apple Intelligence https://gizmodo.com/analyst-predicts-20-monthly-fee-for-apple-intelligence-2000484627

Apple has plenty of precedent for making users sign up for subscriptions.
They surmised it could be a part of Apple One, which is a $20-a-month subscription for multiple services like Apple Music and 2 TB of iCloud
storage.

Here's the thing, Apple has a track record for supplying paid features that should be free and free features that it probably should make users pay
for. Take for instance its Emergency SOS feature that first came with the iPhone 14. That service costs Apple money, but it came free for the two
years after you first activate an iPhone 14 or iPhone 15 (that practice
will presumably continue with iPhone 16). Apple extended that end date for
the Emergency SOS by an extra year last November and added roadside
assistance via satellite as well. Now Apple's expanding it with Emergency
SOS video calling for iOS 18.

In the same way, Apple Intelligence will need to be free to start,
otherwise, it would remain a gate-kept feature that won't actually entice
users to buy an iPhone 15 or iPhone 16-the only two phone lines that will
get AI. All the M-series Macs and iPads will have full access to Apple Intelligence when it rolls around, but it's fair to say both consumers and analysts are most curious to see how it works on iPhones.

Last month, Bloomberg's Apple sleuth Mark Gurman the first few Apple Intelligence features were pushed back to October, rather than arriving at
iOS 18's expected launch in September. Still, users on the iPhone's dev
beta stream have rooted around with the features in its very bare form. Currently, it just means Siri is more conversational, though the beta
chatbot is still limited in a number of ways, according to those who have
used it.

We don't have to worry about paying for Apple Intelligence immediately, especially since competitors at Samsung and Google are pushing on-device chatbot features free, for now at least. Google is offering a full year of
the most expensive Google One subscription for new Chromebooks, which also
gets access to the more advanced Gemini model, but after that users will
need to pay. Samsung and Amazon have both mentioned they may need users to
pay for AI in the future,

Paying for AI seems inevitable, but it won't be immediate. These companies
are still struggling to sell users on how a chatbot can truly revolutionize their phone experience. So far, none have made a case for why users should
care about a bot that can summarize their emails. Perhaps Apple will be the first to crack it, but once users actually want to use it, that's when we
might have to start paying for it.

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