At his final earnings report as chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook told investors something iPhone users have not heard stated clearly until now: the new AI-powered Siri most likely will not be entirely free. Anyone who wants to use it heavily will pay more.

The mechanism Cook described is not a new subscription but an upgrade to one that already exists. The additional computing power for Siri would be bought through iCloud+ - the same service that until now sold photo storage and backups. „We believe there will be people who will want to use it a lot, so we will have some kind of iCloud+ upgrade options, where people will be able to buy a higher tier“, Cook said, adding that the plans are not yet finalised.

So the cloud you bought so you would not run out of room for photos now also becomes a meter for how much you are allowed to talk to your phone. Anthropic and OpenAI already work that way - a limited free version, with serious use paid for. The difference is that with them it was expected from day one. Apple spent years selling the opposite: pay for the device once, everything else comes with it.

Behind the announcement sits a failure Apple does not want to name. The company fell so far behind in the race for an advanced assistant that it had to license a customised Gemini model from Google - its direct competitor - to strengthen its own Siri. And the delay has already cost money: a 250 million dollar (around 230 million euro) settlement in a class action over how the iPhone 16's AI capabilities were advertised. A firm that paid a quarter of a billion for promising a feature that did not exist is now announcing that same feature as a premium product.

The new Siri is available in the iOS 27 beta, with a wider release planned for this autumn. By then Cook will no longer be at the top - John Ternus, the long-serving head of hardware engineering, takes over at the moment he inherits two open fronts at once: falling behind in software and rising prices in hardware.

The second front is more tangible for every buyer. The memory shortage caused by AI data centres has raised the manufacturing cost of almost every device, so Meta, Samsung, Microsoft and Sony have already put up prices on some of their products. Apple raised Mac and iPad prices last month, while the iPhone has so far been left untouched. So far.

The most interesting part is that both things are moving in the same direction. The device gets more expensive, and the feature that was supposed to justify the increase now wants a subscription of its own. Around here a thousand-euro phone is not an impulse purchase - it is a planned decision. The remaining question is simple: how many times can one and the same phone be charged for?