Apple Intelligence Home Features Require 2TB iCloud+ Plan in iOS 27

[cjsuk]

Spot on. What I find interesting is so many people being perpetually unhappy with Apple every day of the year over many years. And not being able to exercise their agency seeking out better tech products. That's really sad.

If I was that unhappy with a tech supplier I'd drop them stat. And go with a competitor that offers better tech products.

Working on it here.

About 90% of my daily compute workload is on Linux now. I have some loose ends to clean up and then I’m all in.

 

[alexgowers]

AI is turning out to be the most silly invention ever. Very expensive, loads of energy use, loads of water use, increased hardware costs all for a text summary of a video and the other various minimally helpful gaslighting responses all whilst raiding the entire creative works of man and paying nothing.

Seriously disappointed in humanity at this point. AI bubble better pop soon, I hate it.

 

[spazzcat]

HomeKit Secure Video already required an iCloud storage tier because the videos were kept in iCloud and did not count towards the storage used in your storage plan. To offset the cost of hosting those videos, they required a storage plan. This has been the case for many years. I had four cameras in my old home, so I was familiar already with the iCloud storage limits. Back then I needed the 2TB tier to have four cameras, but since then, Apple increased the number of cameras. My iPhoto library was 1.2TB, so I already had a 2TB plan long before I started using HomeKit cameras.

I just looked it up now and the 50GB iCloud plan is required for a single HomeKit Secure Video camera. Five cameras are included in the 200GB plan and unlimited are allowed on the 2TB plan.

Since you can’t even have a single camera without at least the 50GB plan, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that these new HomeKit features require an iCloud storage plan.

And most people that are using HKSV most likely already ahve the 2T plan.

 

[spazzcat]

AI is turning out to be the most silly invention ever. Very expensive, loads of energy use, loads of water use, increased hardware costs all for a text summary of a video and the other various minimally helpful gaslighting responses all whilst raiding the entire creative works of man and paying nothing.

Seriously disappointed in humanity at this point. AI bubble better pop soon, I hate it.

I have bad news for you AI isn't going anywhere.

 

[spazzcat]

People have a right to be outraged. It's called freedom of speech on an Apple forum.

Check the calendar and today ends in Y, so someone is outraged at Apple. Also, I don't know any cloud base service out there that's less than $9.99 a month for cameras.

 

[spazzcat]

What I find interesting is why you care about people who have differing opinions other than yourself. Maybe you need a break from the forums if people bashing Apple bothers you so much.

It's because all the constant whining and complaining gets way of actually having discussions

 

[spazzcat]

What bugs me about subscriptions (and I'm sure I'm not alone here) is that the price you pay has no correlation to how much you use it.

I used to pay for YouTube Music, but it was only something I may have used for a few hours over the weekend.
But I have to pay the exact same amount that someone does who is listening to it for hours and hours every single day of the week.

That would be like you paying a set Gas/Petrol charge irrespective of how far you drive.

How about we have different tiers of pricing dependent on usage, or even a "Pay as you go" where you get charged a few cents/pennies for your usage.

I don't mind paying a bit for something I use a little.
But I'm not going to pay a large payment every month for my own very minimal usage

It would end up costing you more.

 

[Piggie]

It would end up costing you more.

Of course it 100% depends on how the pricing model is designed.

I mean, If there was half price 10 hour a week plan (for example) then I may go for that.

It's the same reason so many years ago pirated photoshop as they liked to use it, but could never justify the price to do the occasional few things a pro at a company would want it for.

Which of course, despite what Adobe publicly said was the reason they became a photo editing standard in the 1st place.

 

[GuruZac]

Apple's AI pay-gate coming soon! What a joke.

I pay for Claude and Grok. I am not paying for Apple AI if, or should I say when they start pay-wall gatekeeping AI features.

 

[b.la]

Will it tell you if your dog is barking yet?

 

[k1121j]

I do hope these new "features" work well they sure sound good on paper.

I don't have a lot of hope these features will even work, the current motion detection and face recognition does not work 80% of the time. it would stink to have to have a price increase to cover these new "features" that Apple is gifting us and to have them not work like the current "features"

 

[turbineseaplane]

I wish Apple would support more localized type things. Buy an Apple router and it does stuff like this for you locally type stuff.

That would be great indeed!
The problem is that doesn't make the "Subscription Revenue" number go up 📈

 

[TracerAnalog]

Apple's AI pay-gate coming soon! What a joke.

AI tokens are expensive, and companies that offer it need a way to cover the cost. I prefer straight up paying for it, instead of selling my soul, time (effing ads) and privacy to those golems at OpenAI, Google and -makes retching sounds- Meta.

 

[BeatCrazy]

All these folks so upset that everything in the world isn't free. Can't understand that things that require constant AI usage cost companies money and therefore they can't provide them for free.

How dare they not give me everything at no cost at all!

It's kinda funny, actually. There are also people that realize the value of 'not giving money to the greedy AI companies', which is driving the explosion of locally-hosted open weight AI models. Which in turn drives demand and prices for GPUs and high-memory Macs.

Everyone complaining about this thread topic can either pay Apple $10/month, or fight the wolves to try and build your own with locally-hosted processing.

There is no free lunch.

 

[Alfonson]

Wow, Apple, don’t you have enough money already? Damn.

Don’t you know how capitalism works?

 

[BeatCrazy]

...What bro no lol. Don't spit ball unless you know what you're talking about. "Smart" NVR's/DVR's have existed for awhile now along with many other AIO passthrough setups. Stop taking the bait

Yes, smart/AI NVRs have existed for a while, but let's be real - they are not user friendly for most people to set up. Yes, a big percentage of MR forum users can tackle it.

But what Apple wants to offer is something you can set up for your aunt or grandparent as a 'set and forget' type of system. And Apple is pretty good at that.

 

[BeatCrazy]

And storage if you have a lot of cameras.

I noticed the cost of a 10TB Western Digital Purple Pro has gone up to over $500!! If you would have asked me in 2019, I would have told you this drive should cost $50 by now.

 

[bassanoclapper]

Almost everyone here vigorously claimed, multiple times, back in 2025 they'd remove Apple AI as soon as it was loaded/installed on their Apple devices.

And now people are going non-linear about one Apple AI feature (HomeKit video camera motion alerts) being a paid for iCloud+ option? Too funny.

Those 2 groups don’t necessarily have to overlap in a significant way.

FWIW, I turned off Apple Intelligence, still haven’t installed iOS26 on my personal devices will be very unlikely to use AI when I eventually update to iOS27

 

[turbineseaplane]

I noticed the cost of a 10TB Western Digital Purple Pro has gone up to over $500!! If you would have asked me in 2019, I would have told you this drive should cost $50 by now.

If just looking at age of tech, it should be $50.

As we all know, other factors have inverted everything for a while here.

 

[hybrid_x]

Well, I guess that's one way of gatekeeping the premium features.

 

[artifex]

I’m building out my Home Assistant system. I can’t even deal with with crap.

Well, at least we know now Apple isn't going to announce that the next Apple TV, nor the Home Hub, will have buckets of RAM for a proper vision model to manage this locally.

If a camera detects movement in the backyard, it'd be nice not to have to ping an internet server to decide if it's an animal or someone trespassing.

 

[Mansu944]

I’m done with subscriptions

 

[satchmo]

Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.

Apple: The "Uncarrier" of tech

😉 😂

I will say, they are doing a good job of slowly boiling the frog to the point of having the fanbase ultimately defend behaviors they would have formerly been against. It's quite cunning.

 

[Arran]

Are there any good cameras to use this with in the first place? I tried to find an external one a while back, it was slim pickings.

Aqara is the best I've found so far.

I used Logi cameras for years and they were just OK. I recently replaced them with Eufy (S3 Pros with a G3 homebase) and it has a been an expensive exercise in rage and frustration. When they weren't going offline themselves they were flooding my network and knocking everything else offline. Pure chaos. Will never buy another. And their iOS app is an awful dogs-dinner of inconsistent, half-implemented features and intrusive popups/surveys.

The cheap Aqara G100 ($40) is 10 times better than the old Logis (I have five now). The $200 Aqara G5 Pro is seriously impressive (I have just one, but may add another). All six cameras are almost instant response when viewing in Apple Home. Never had that before.

Forget Eufy HomeKit cameras and just look out the window instead.

Edit: Fixed camera model from S9 to S3