Apple charges 20 times more to describe the video than to record it

Apple Intelligence for Home reached HomeKit Secure Video with iOS 27 on 14 September, pairing the old motion trigger with multimodal AI that reads the frame and writes a sentence, and The Verge has now run the three platforms side by side. Apple charges $10 a month for one camera, $30 for two and $60 for up to five, with no tier above five. Recording those same five cameras without the captions costs $2.99. Apple prices the sentence about the video at twenty times the video.

“There's real benefit in a system knowing everything about my home. I'd just prefer to be the only one who knows it.”

— Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, senior smart-home reviewer at The Verge

Google and Amazon both charge $20 a month for the same layer on as many cameras as you own, Ring adding $3 per camera for 24/7 recording on wired models. At five cameras Apple works out at $12 per camera per month against $4, which is $720 a year against $240, and past five cameras Apple has nothing to sell you at any price.

What the premium buys

The reviewer installed a Ring Wired Doorbell Pro at $249.99, a Google Nest Doorbell 2K at $199.99 and, for Apple, an Aqara G400 at $99, because Apple still makes no camera of its own. Her results:

• A robot lawn mower came back as “a tennis serve simulator is rolling on the walkway”, and on another pass as “a gray hoverboard is driving on the pathway”.
• A cat on the porch: Apple said “a cat sat on the porch”, Ring said “a cat is standing on the pathway outside the porch”, and Google named which one, “a black and white cat walks across the porch”.
• Merged alerts: Apple produced “Someone seen. Someone carried a box”, where Ring and Google wrote “a person carried a box up the driveway”.
• Apple's noteworthy-events feature surfaced one thing in two weeks: the trash pickup.

Face recognition split the same way. Ring identified her every time she walked up to the door. Google managed about half, and spent the other half convinced she was her daughter's best friend, an improvement on last year when it had her down as the UPS driver. Apple hedged, alternating between her name, “someone who may be Jennifer Pattison Tuohy”, and plain “someone”. We went through what that error rate costs when the buyer is a police department rather than a homeowner: bought on minutes saved, audited on accuracy almost nowhere.

Ring runs the one feature in the review that attacked the real problem, which is volume. Unusual Event learns what normal traffic looks like on each camera and stays quiet otherwise, which cut her alerts from around 40 a day to two or three. Google's camera-triggered automations went the other way: asked to feed one specific cat, the pet feeder dispensed for all three.

The line the premium crosses

Standard HomeKit Secure Video processes footage on the home hub and encrypts it end to end before it reaches iCloud, which is the whole of Apple's pitch against the competition. Turning on Apple Intelligence moves the summarising into Private Cloud Compute, where Apple decrypts the clips to work on them. Apple says PCC writes the captions, returns them and permanently deletes the data, with no admin access and nothing identifying whose footage it was. The $60 tier and the end-to-end guarantee cannot both be switched on.

Ring rebuilt its own model last month with an encryption scheme that rotates keys and deletes Ring's copy after 24 hours, so it says it can no longer hand decrypted video to police, though a court can still compel the encrypted files. Google encrypts in transit and at rest without end-to-end. Anker Eufy, Reolink, Ubiquiti UniFi and UGreen sell boxes that keep the processing in the house. Apple has shipped late AI before, and we have looked at what happens when a recording indicator faces the wrong way. Until Apple ships its own camera, the choice on HomeKit runs between $2.99 with end-to-end encryption and $60 without it.

Informational material, not investment advice. Prices are the monthly plans as listed in the review, and the accuracy findings are one reviewer's results on one set of hardware.