| ▲ | Apple bets cheaper AI will woo small developers(techcrunch.com) |
| 42 points by jbernardo95 8 hours ago | 21 comments |
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| ▲ | e28eta 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| I haven’t been able to find a cost for larger developers. Is that published yet? Their presentations talked about how it was based on the user’s quota, with higher quotas for iCloud+ subscribers. |
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| ▲ | Grimblewald 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cheaper isn't as much of a problem as functional. |
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| ▲ | Grombobulous 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If I were to guess, cheaper in this context is being used by Apple to catch up to having an AI product with a real moat. And, of course, Apple’s best moat is the App Store. The other competitors have their coding and productivity software, all the stuff they built around their models. Apple doesn’t really have much of that and I think this is essentially their only hope to gain some B2B revenue from AI. | |
| ▲ | throwaway27448 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think precisely the opposite: the marginal value of expensive models is quite small. | |
| ▲ | emodendroket an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, yeah, if it doesn't work at all nobody will use it. But the big players are spending $1k/mo.+ on AI at this point. That's obviously out of reach for many. |
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| ▲ | yalogin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What is the target to write for is the key aspect here. Not sure there is enough on the phone for developers to create new experiences. I fear all of them are going to try to automate everything on the phone for the user. Not sure what value that provides. May be I am overly skeptical , let’s see |
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| ▲ | thewebguyd an hour ago | parent [-] | | Maybe I'm a "simple" user but I honestly can't think of anything I'd need automated on my phone that I haven't already automated myself with shortcuts. It's first and foremost a communication device, and I don't need AI automation to reply to my messages or emails for me, nor do I necessarily want purchases/ordering things automated either. The personal context/search stuff is nice, but that's first party now so yeah, not much room for new experiences. |
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| ▲ | stevenwireless 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| but these "free" tokens take up an end user's daily free quota, after which a user needs to pay. ? |
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| ▲ | thallavajhula 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Reading the title I had a very different notion of what to expect. The article has something completely different. I was hoping this would be something for indie app devs. |
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| ▲ | blobbers 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | uhh isn't it basically free access to API if your apps are less than 2 million downloads? | | |
| ▲ | hdjrudni 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Before opening the link I thought they were reducing the cost per token. This smells more like a get you hooked and then crank the costs. Not that I'd be any less skeptical of the first option. We've already seen providers reduce quotas and raise prices. |
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| ▲ | sublinear 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is this more scraping at the bottom of the barrel? I get it. So many tech companies built their platforms around people submitting their work for sale. Now that things have cooled down they're desperate. This is exactly like what happened to the music and movie industries. If they want to make money they must take bigger creative risks. AI is the exact opposite of that because it's trained on what's already been done. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Small developers: "Your $99/year tithe has cost me thousands of dollars to provide basic support for your ecosystem." Apple: "Did somebody say 'we want cheaper AI'?" |
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| ▲ | jmclnx 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Apple is hoping to draw in newer developers with lower AI infrastructure costs Good luck, but define "cheaper" ? If you have to pay, no individual will pay, just corporations. |
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| ▲ | dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How do you come to this conclusion. I know several people that are absolutely not techy dev types, yet they pay for a subscription to chatgpt. | | |
| ▲ | emodendroket an hour ago | parent [-] | | You can get a certain portion of the population to pay $20/mo. but I think it's a very small population who's paying enough to actually cover frontier models in agentic workflows right now. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Either I've fallen in with a unique group of non-techy people willing to pay for an LLM subscription, or you just not giving enough credit to it. I guess time will tell | | |
| ▲ | emodendroket 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | https://www.npr.org/2026/06/04/nx-s1-5791661/chatgpt-gemini-... > Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions. But even among these people I doubt most spring for the $100 plans, let alone are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per user the way corporate users do. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The funniest part of all of this is that, I as a techy dev type person, pay $0 for any LLM account. No, I'm not cheating with a paid by employer account. I just don't use it. So I guess my little group is breaking all of the stereotypes |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If you have to pay, no individual will pay Fee with ads is the right fit for most people. But I don't think that describes most Apple customers or developers. |
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| ▲ | genghisjahn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I'm 5'7" thank you very much. That's above average in some regions. |
