Some of the smartest additions in iOS 27 live quietly in the Home app, where Apple Intelligence is finally doing something genuinely useful with your security cameras. There is a catch, though, and it is a familiar one. You have to pay for the privilege, and not with pocket change.
To get the new Apple Intelligence Home features, you need at least the 2TB iCloud+ plan, which runs $9.99 a month. Anything below that and the clever stuff simply does not turn on.
What You Actually Get
Across iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate, the Home app can now do a lot more with HomeKit Secure Video cameras. It writes plain English summaries of motion alerts, so instead of “motion detected” you get something closer to a description of what actually happened.
It also groups footage from separate cameras into a single overview of activity, surfaces the clips it thinks are worth your attention, and supports natural language search. Being able to ask your Home app to show you every time a van pulled into the drive is the kind of feature that makes a wall of camera thumbnails suddenly usable.
The Catch: 2TB or Nothing
Here is where a few people will bristle. These are not features gated behind a one off purchase or a new HomePod. They are gated behind a storage tier. If you are on the 50GB or 200GB iCloud+ plan, which covers a huge number of people perfectly well, you are locked out of the Home AI entirely until you upgrade or fold it into Apple One.
It is a soft paywall dressed up as a storage requirement, and it is a slightly awkward look for features that lean on on-device and Apple’s private cloud processing rather than raw storage space.
To Be Fair to Apple
It is not quite the cash grab it looks like at first glance. A couple of things soften it.
First, HomeKit Secure Video footage does not count against your iCloud+ storage, so the full 2TB stays free for your photos and everything else. Second, the 2TB plan already unlocks unlimited HomeKit Secure Video cameras, which means the people most likely to want camera AI, the ones running several cameras, are probably already paying for it. For them, this is a free upgrade rather than a new bill. It is the single camera household on a cheaper plan that gets nudged.
The Pattern Worth Watching
This is not the first Apple Intelligence feature to arrive with a string attached, and it will not be the last. The new Siri came with a waitlist and its own questions about what it costs, some features are not launching in the EU at all, and now the best Home tricks want you on a higher storage tier. The “AI is just part of the OS now” story keeps collecting asterisks.
None of it is outrageous on its own. Together, though, it is a quiet reminder that Apple Intelligence is increasingly something you subscribe your way into rather than simply switch on. iOS 27 lands this autumn, and this is one of those features worth checking your plan for before you get excited.
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