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