Siri AI Got a Price Before It Got an EU Date

A pricing answer on the way out the door

On 30 July Tim Cook took his last earnings call as chief executive of Apple, closing a quarter of 109.42 billion dollars and telling analysts that John Ternus would be leading these calls from here. Somewhere in that valedictory hour he answered the question Apple had left open since June, which is how it intends to make money from Siri AI. Cook said the company does believe there will be people who want to use it a lot, "and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+, where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we'll see how the pickup for that is."

Read narrowly, that commits Apple to very little. There is no price, no tier, no usage quota, and Cook conceded that the plans are not set in stone and that the company is early in working out how to charge for AI services. Read for shape, it settles something. Siri AI is going to be metered, and the meter will sit inside a subscription that most people currently buy to store photographs. A capability that arrives inside the operating system and a capability you top up on an account are two different products to budget for.

The feature is not on sale in the same places

Apple had already told European customers in June, in its own newsroom, what they would not be getting. Craig Federighi said Apple was "deeply disappointed that our EU users won't have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year." The published list is specific: no dedicated app for revisiting conversations, no expanded Visual Intelligence experience, no integrated writing tools, no Siri mode in Camera on iOS. Developers based in the EU also cannot test or use the new Siri AI features inside their own iOS and iPadOS apps, which pushes the effect past Apple's own software and into everybody else's.

What Apple did not withhold matters just as much. Siri AI does reach Europe, on macOS 27 and visionOS 27. So this is not a border being closed. It is a product line being cut lengthwise: withheld on the two device classes that European organisations actually deploy in volume, and shipped on the two that almost none of them standardise on.

Designation follows the platform, not the contract

The reason the line falls exactly there is worth understanding, because it will recur with other vendors. The Digital Markets Act does not designate companies in the abstract. It designates core platform services, and iOS and iPadOS carry that designation while macOS and visionOS do not. Apple's own argument is that under what it calls an extreme interpretation of the DMA it would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users' private data, and the ability to control other installed applications, the moment Siri AI appeared in the EU. Whether or not that reading survives contact with the Commission, the mechanism is the same either way: the obligation attaches to the platform, so the product splits along platform lines.

Now hold that against a single subscription. iCloud+ is one account-level product sold on the same terms across the European Union. If Cook's plan lands as he described it, a customer in Lisbon or Vienna will be able to buy additional Siri AI capacity on one account and find it usable on the Mac on the desk and not on the iPhone in the pocket. That reframes the question to ask any AI vendor. It is not whether the thing is available in your country. It is which platforms the entitlement covers, and whether that is written down anywhere you could enforce it.

Two statements on the record, no date between them

Apple's position is that the Commission's "refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI's availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU." The Commission's position, given to reporters, is that the decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU "is Apple's and Apple's only because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU." Both are on the record. Neither carries a date.

For anyone planning an estate, that absence is the operative fact. A feature two parties are publicly blaming each other for is not delayed in any sense you can schedule around. It is unscheduled, and the difference matters in a business case, because a delay can be waited out and an unscheduled feature has to be either replaced or removed from the plan. Nothing in either statement suggests a mechanism that would produce a date on a predictable timetable.

What to check before the autumn releases

Three checks are cheap in August and expensive in October. Count what you actually deploy: if the estate is iPhone and iPad, any Siri AI capability sitting in a 2026 or 2027 plan is unavailable to you and undated, whatever the vendor deck implies. Separate your markets, because Apple's exclusion is drafted as an EU exclusion and the United Kingdom left the European Union, so British and German offices are not in the same position on the same morning. Then look at how iCloud+ is actually billed in your organisation, because if it runs per user through a central account you are about to carry a line item whose value depends on which device each person happens to carry.

Then push it into the paperwork. Ask any AI vendor, not only Apple, to state entitlement per platform and per market in the contract rather than in a launch post, and to say what happens to a paid tier when a feature is withheld or withdrawn in one region. It is also worth noting who is answering. The executive who set out this pricing hands over the chief executive role on 1 September, and the person who has to land it is John Ternus.

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