On Apple's fiscal Q4 earnings call Monday, new CEO John Ternus had a number he clearly wanted investors to remember. "Siri has long been popular with our users with more than two and a half billion requests every day," he said, "and with Siri AI, we really have the kind of the Siri that we always wanted." The 2.5 billion figure — first aired by Apple's VP of AI product marketing Lilian Rincon at the September iPhone event — is doing double duty, according to AppleInsider: it's a scale flex, and it's a confession.

Start with the asterisk. At WWDC 2024, Apple said Siri handled 1.5 billion voice requests daily. The new number doesn't specify what's being counted — it sweeps in every timer set, message sent, and HomeKit light switched on. So it's hard to say how much Siri usage has actually grown versus how much the definition has. Apple also won't say how many of those 2.5 billion requests touch the new Siri AI, which remains a waitlist-gated beta that just expanded to French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish alongside English last week.

Now the confession part. Server-side Siri AI features carry daily usage limits, and Apple says "expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future," Mac to Reality noted in the availability fine print of Apple's Newsroom post. The cap falls exactly where the costs are: requests handled on your phone run on silicon you already bought; the cloud requests hit Apple's servers — and CFO Kevan Parekh told analysts Siri AI cloud expenses will flow through services cost of sales. Apple guided December-quarter gross margin down to 45%–46%, blaming higher memory prices and Siri AI ramp costs, per The National.

The privacy framing and the economics point to the same split. "That's why Apple Intelligence runs on device whenever it can," Ternus said, as tikr reported. True — and convenient. The metered part of Siri is precisely the part Apple pays to serve. A fee tier would land in Services, Apple's highest-margin business; Apple hasn't named a price or a date, though its support page ties broader access to 2027 software releases.

What to watch: whether the waitlist lifts before the China rollout — Siri AI arrives there via Alibaba's Qwen in a developer beta Wednesday — and what Apple prices the top-up at. Two and a half billion requests a day is a flex. It's also a bill.

— via AppleInsider