Paid Apple Intelligence features are likely at least 3 years away

Some analysts this week started reporting that Apple could charge as much as $20/month for some Apple Intelligence features. While that may be true, we likely won’t see Apple charging for these features for at least 3 years.

In this weekends Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman directly addressed some of the recent reports about paid Apple Intelligence features. Although he does believe that the company will eventually start charging for these features, it won’t be as soon as a lot of people are worried about.

Apple unveiled the initial Apple Intelligence feature set back at WWDC, including an all new Siri, Genmoji, Image Playground, as well as a plethora of features sprinkled around Apple’s stock apps. While these features are great, they do mostly run on-device. Given the fact that Apple is mostly playing catch-up in the AI race, it’d be a silly move for them to charge for something so basic this early on.

Gurman writes that he expects the company to develop more advanced features on top of the existing Apple Intelligence feature set and charge for those features, but he believes that it’ll take the company at least three years to develop something worth charging for, and that “may be the best-case scenario.”

In short, you won’t have to worry about paying for Siri anytime soon.