Smartphones Are Pushing AI but Will Anyone Ever Want to Pay for It?

Starting earlier this year with the Samsung Galaxy S24 launch, the companies behind the most popular smartphones seem to be dead-set on using AI features as selling points for new hardware. Much of it will be free to start with, but eventually everything comes with a cost.

Samsung’s S24 launch was loaded with the supposed benefits of AI — promises that largely didn’t land in real-world use cases, at least when it came to photography. Some were good or showed potential, but all of them clearly needed more training to become worthwhile. Outside of these software features, the new smartphones didn’t add much that would make them a compelling upgrade over the S23. Even with so much of the value of these phones being on AI-based enhancements, buyers still don’t know if it’s they will have access to them for the lifetime of the phone.

“Galaxy AI features will be provided for free until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices,” Samsung explains in two different footnotes on its S24 Ultra product page. Once Samsung starts charging for those features, will anyone pay to continue accessing them regardless of how much they might cost?

Apple, too, has jumped in on AI. Apple Intelligence will come later this year and while it will be included on devices when it does launch, some experts don’t believe that’s a strategy Apple can employ forever.

According to analysts, Apple could charge as much as $20 for access to its AI features, CNBC reports. According to Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, the cost of integrating AI is just too high to eat and Apple will want to pass at least some of that cost on to end users. Apple One already costs $20 a month, meaning that if Shah is right, some users could end up forking over upwards of $40 a month at some point in addition to the upfront cost of hardware.

Apple could, of course, decide not to charge users for it’s AI — it’s done similarly before. As Gizmodo notes, its Emergency SOS feature that first launched with the iPhone 14 could have been a premium feature but was free for two years. It eventually extended it by an extra year and will add Emergency SOS video calling to it in iOS 18. Still, the cost of developing AI plus the partnership with OpenAI can’t be cheap, and with shareholders demanding endlessly growing profits, it is hard to imagine Apple providing access to its AI features for free forever. At the very least, it’s not crazy to expect Apple to charge for some AI features — perhaps the generative AI-powered photo editing. Whatever does happen, Apple Intelligence will almost certainly be free for at least a couple of years.

Google is poised to launch its new Pixel devices next week at it’s Made By Google launch event that is, unsurprisingly, focused on AI. Any AI features announced will almost undoubtedly be free at launch, but with its main competitors unlikely able to sustain free access to AI features endlessly, it would be surprising if Google could.

A survey of Americans from earlier this year found that most aren’t overly excited about AI — quite the opposite in fact. Top words that described their feelings towards the technology were cautious, concerned, and skeptical. “Impressed” was third from the bottom. Another study found that consumers weren’t just unimpressed by AI, they are actively turned off by the technology. A third study found that AI often triggers fear and concern, not awe and amazement. Investors also showed some uncertainty in the value of AI during the market dip earlier this week, so it’s not just consumers who are questioning its value.

One of the arguments for AI is that while it might not be very good at launch, continued use will eventually provide better results. But as Chris Niccolls says in his review of the S24 Ultra, right now results are so bad that users might just be so turned off by it, they never return.

Lacking major hardware improvements and with the knowledge that AI features aren’t always going to be free, upgrading to the latest and greatest suddenly loses its luster. Maybe some folks will be happy to fork over yet another costly subscription but with the rising cost of streaming services, editing software, cloud storage, and more, it’s hard not to question at what point the damn breaks and the consumer just says “no.”

Image credits: Elements of header photo licensed via Depositphotos.