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Macworld

Business / Macworld

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iOS 27 may be free, but the AI bill won

Macworld One of the first things they teach you in business school is just dont go into the restaurant business. Its terrible. Seriously. One of the next things they teach you is how to conduct a cost/benefit analysis. Or maybe thats in the second semester. The Macalope doesnt remember; he slept through a lot of business school. But hes been thinking about cost/benefit analysis a lot lately with regard to AI. For most use cases, AI is really a substitute for search. The web has consistently been a struggle between free and open and a bunch of would-be gatekeepers from AOL to Meta who want to keep you on their pages instead of having you go to some pesky website created by some yahoo who probably doesnt even know any venture capitalists. Gross. Even Google, whose whole raison dtre was finding web pages for you, would now rather you stay on its site and read an answer its AI scraped off the page of the person who actually did the work to come up with the answer in the first place and, oh, here, look at some ads, since we have you. In playing with Siri AI in the iOS 27 public beta, the Macalope has experienced some real benefits. One example: after fruitlessly searching in his Mail inbox for a gift card he received a year and a half ago, he was able to just ask Siri AI to find the gift card so-and-so sent me (he used a real name rather than so-and-so its not that amazing) and it found it almost immediately. That does , however, seems a bit more like an indictment of search in Mail (and, sure, the living out of your inbox lifestyle) than anything else. Couldnt Apple just fixed search in Mail? To be sure, there are a number of other neat features of Siri AI that are not simply better search capabilities, but while its all neat, the Horny One found himself thinking: is it all worth the cost? You may be saying, but Mr. Macalope, sir, iOS 27 is a free upgrade! There is no cost! THE MACALOPE KNOWS THAT, TODD! Sheesh. Freakin Todd. There may be no cost to get iOS 27, but there sure is a cost to AI in general. Apple has yet to raise prices on iPhones as it has done to other products because of the difficulty in getting RAM and storage thanks to AI, but it will be soon ( possibly even this week ). Moreover, Tim Cook, a guy whos apparently happy to deliver bad news since hes on the way out the door of the CEOs office, has suggested that heavy use of Siri AI could mean additional charges for users. As ridiculous as it might seem after Apple just substantially raised prices on a slew of products thanks to AI, were actually not paying the full cost of AI yet. AI companies have artificially kept prices low in order to get people hooked on it. It is unfair to describe it as the drug dealer model, as many other lines of business have long used the same tactic in order to gain adherents. But also drug dealers do it. If youd like to receive regular news and updates to your inbox, sign up for our newsletters , including The Macalope and Apple Breakfast , David Prices weekly, bite-sized roundup of all the latest Apple news and rumors. Foundry As AI companies start inching prices up and businesses that made big, stupid bets on AI start realizing theyre only going to go up further, this is leading to a bit of a squeeze. Dont worry, theyve got it all figured out. Software Giant SAP Stops Most Travel and Hiring Because of AIs Soaring Cost Cool, cool, oh, so very cool. Maybe, much like counties with data centers have asked schools to turn off lights and residents not to use air conditioning in the middle of summer and in the middle of global warming, perhaps companies can ask employees to bring their own toilet paper to work or forgo other benefits they previously enjoyed, like 401Ks and healthcare. These are the costs were paying for AI as a whole. Many are paying for AI whether they use it or not. The question the Macalope is asking himself, as a user of Apple products, is the utility were getting from AI features worth the increase in price on those products? [long mockumentary-style zoom in on the Macalopes face from across the room as he shakes his head and mouths, Nope!] And, hey, the Macalope isnt even talking about the environmental or societal costs of AI in general (like the very scary consequences of weirdos like Sam Altman getting even richer than they already are because look how that worked out before ). Those are hard and, frankly, depressing to quantify. Rest assured that the Macalope could quantify them if he wanted to; he simply does not want to. There are just so many good shows these days. Personally, the Macalope simply does not want to spend more on tech products in order to pay for a feature thats, yeah, kinda good but just not worth the cost. Since he cant change the prices of things, hes going to be buying fewer tech products and buying cheaper models. Hes just morally opposed to being asked to pay for a meal some guy across the room ordered. Its as simple as that.

11 Aug 2026 4:00 pm