iOS 27 AI Camera Summaries Cost $9.99 for One Camera, $59.99 for Five

Apple is turning into a hardware company backed by subscriptions.

I’ll stick with UniFi no monthly charges and it works in Apple home with homebridge

I love Apple, but this subscription direction they're going is not good.

No. Just no. Not only no, hell no. Never.

$59.99 for what amounts to ripping people off beyond belief, for a service that is likely barely viable? This ain’t the way forward, Jonny boy.

Between last week’s extremely boring, charisma-lacking infomercial, updating to iOS 27 today and seeing just how pervasive Apple’s AI nonsense has become, and now reading this, I’m seriously debating a wholesale move to Ubuntu and boycotting Apple wherever I can.

The Apple tax was already high enough. I was willing to pay it because, historically, there was a reason for it. The hardware was exceptional, the software was cohesive, and the overall experience justified paying a premium over alternatives.

What I’m increasingly unwilling to do is pay an even higher premium for software I don’t want, features I didn’t ask for, and AI functionality that provides me with little, if any, meaningful benefit while actively eroding user experience/ performance and complicating an otherwise perfectly viable product.

That doesn’t mean removing every Apple product from my home. It does mean actively looking for an alternative platform without this pervasive nonsense forced upon me. Kudos to those who are actually experiencing a benefit from it. But the constant discussion around models, local versus cloud processing, etc. feels far more relevant to DevOps and niche users than it does to Apple’s broad base.

The chips have become so good that OEMs now seem to feel the need to bake bloat and slop into perfectly capable hardware just to give people another reason to upgrade.

I’m out.

And to be clear, I’m not wholesale against AI. I’m wholesale against taking perfectly viable products and making them orders of magnitude worse for me by filling them with software I never asked for and don’t want.

I stopped using Microsoft in 2007 because I found a more efficient, less bloated operating system that didn’t completely reinvent itself with every update and force me to relearn years of muscle memory. There was real value in that.

Hearing Michael Phelp's cousin talk about AirPods 5 as though it were some revolutionary new product, complete with features Apple already had on the market in other variants for years, was beyond comical. That felt less like a product launch and more like a website update and press release versus airtime in the Infomercial.

There seems to be almost zero creativity and passion left within the company. The design department is gone, and the ingredients Steve stocked in the cupboard for Tim to move Apple forward appear to be exhausted.

Watching a Jony Ive rip-off parade around while all these avant-garde wannabe designers wear goofy clothing and unveil some of the weakest products Apple has brought to market, while simultaneously implementing these price gouges is a slap in the face to many of us on this thread who supported Apple for years.

The Apple tax used to be the price of admission for a superior experience. Now it increasingly feels like a surcharge for being trapped in the ecosystem. I'll liberate myself from this garbaggio garden well before I continue to play along.

I’m not interested in paying a higher tax and remaining loyal when the company clearly gouges customers. The case could be made in the past the COO and ROI was worth the premium. Not so today.

Tim took over and was already underway with supply chain improvements despite not being a visionary or product guy. For the HW focused CEO to drop what they announced last week, and now a grossly overpriced subscription is off-putting and a sign this ain't the guy who brings us revolutionary products. All signs point to me too products at beyond exorbitant prices.

You will own nothing and still be happy!

I’m getting two of the 2 TB iPhone Duo because I am an AI power user, but I have 10 cameras across my 3 vacation houses. Why am limited to 5? There should be a $300 / mo / 10 camera plan.