Apple Home’s new security camera features cost as much as $60 a month - theverge.com

Apple Intelligence upgrades to HomeKit Secure Video come with a steep cost.

With the public release of iOS 27 and tvOS 27, Apple Home is getting an injection of Apple Intelligence — but you’ll have to pay more for it.

Apple Intelligence for Home brings AI-powered video summaries to HomeKit Secure Video, so you can get short text descriptions of who and what compatible security cameras saw, along with the clip. It also adds a new video search feature and the ability to stitch footage from multiple cameras into one clip, making it easier to keep an eye on what’s happening around your home without scrolling through footage.

But to get these features, you’ll need to pay $9.99 a month for the 2TB iCloud Plus plan (or $39.95 a month for an Apple One Premier subscription) — and that’s just for one camera. According to an Apple support page, to add Apple Intelligence to a second camera, you’ll have to pay $29.99 a month for the 6TB plan. For up to five cameras, it’s a whopping $59.99 a month for the 12TB plan. No word on whether you can add more than five cameras. (Recordings from HomeKit-connected cameras don’t count toward your storage quota.)

That’s way too expensive. While the improved video features are useful — I’ve been testing them in beta and have been impressed — they’re not good enough to justify that big a price jump.

HomeKit Secure Video has always been behind a paywall, but it started at a very reasonable $1 a month. That’s for the 50GB iCloud Plus plan, which includes recorded footage from one camera, plus smart alerts and facial recognition. For more cameras, you bump up to 2TB / $9.99 a month (up to five), and 6TB / $29.99 a month or higher for unlimited cameras. But the cost for the Apple Intelligence features is a huge increase.

I currently pay $40 a month for Apple One Premier, which includes 2TB of iCloud storage and gets me HomeKit Secure Video support for five cameras. With the new pricing tier, I keep those benefits and now get Apple Intelligence on one camera. But to get it on all five cameras, I’d need to pay an additional $60 a month. That’s $720 a year, for a total of $1,200.

Amazon’s Ring and Google Nest charge around $20 a month for subscription tiers that include similar AI-powered features for their cameras, and both companies offer more features than Apple currently does. An iCloud Plus plan does include storage for photos, files, and device backups, and higher plans may get you higher limits for Siri AI and other Apple Intelligence features, but Apple hasn’t released any details about that.

The good news is that none of this changes what you get with the standard HomeKit Secure Video today, and the new software releases have added under-the-hood upgrades that improve speed and reliability, plus the service now supports 4K video resolution. The change only applies if you want the new Apple Intelligence video features. But while Apple Intelligence feels like a significant improvement for Apple Home, at these prices, the value just isn’t there.

Screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge