Craig’s Hairspray Can’t Hide Apple Intelligence’s 12GB and iCloud+ Catch

Apple Intelligence now comes in tiers: None, Some and All. The full experience needs 12GB RAM and Siri usage will push users to iCloud+. After two years of AI promises, Apple has turned a platform feature into an upgrade funnel with a subscription meter attached.

Craig’s hairspray meets Apple Intelligence’s awkward 12GB footnote. Siri is pimped out by iCloud+ or she won’t perform for you either.

Here‘s a follow-up to WWDC2026 covering the bits Apple swept under the carpet and must not get away with.

I wrote this earlier, right after WWDC ended. Then I did a double take and re-examined what I’d watched. My mouth dropped open, gobsmacked with disappointment at what I eked out of the almost-hidden announcements.

Siri and Apple have an even bigger problem than I originally wrote about in the hour after WWDC 2026: a brains problem and a paywall.

One of the largest is, that if you’re not on an iPhone 17 Pro or Air, you don’t get the full version of Apple Intelligence on-device. You get a better version of the poor example we already have.

Two years after telling people to upgrade to the iPhone 16 to get “Apple Intelligence” and that it would run on all Macs and iPads with an M-Series in it Apple has half kept its promise.

Unless your device has 12GB of RAM then you don’t get all the bells and whistles on-device, because for all the fawning and flocking of the tech fetish press to praise Apple for “doing it right, in the end,” sadly Apple has done what it does to so many early adopters:

remind them why you never buy into an Apple gen1 version. Of anything. Especially something they didn’t launch properly for two years.

Because the Siri and AI shown at WWDC will not work on an iPhone 16 Pro Max on-device. In fact it won’t even work on a base iPhone 17. It needs 12GB of RAM because Apple has found it isn’t that exceptional after all, and can’t cram their model into 8GB. That’s what two years of hubris gets you: a smack on the mouth.

And Siri is use-limited and capped, unless you have an iCloud+ account.

If Siri AI needs iCloud+ to avoid limits, then Apple Intelligence is no longer simply a free platform upgrade. It is becoming a metered cognitive service layered on top of hardware people already bought.

This is why Apple needed to own the stack - now it rents it.

Apple now has to charge customers for AI and Siri that were meant to be part of the package.

This is what you get when you don’t invest in capex and compute: a failure to deliver, rising customer costs, and a lousy experience for existing users. Shame on Apple.

So now “Apple Intelligence” comes in three tiers:

None,
Some, and
All.
No exceptions.
No refunds.
No apology.

Oh, and Siri is use-limited, unless you have an iCloud+ account. But they haven’t elaborated on that much yet.

This is reprehensible to me. Apple sold Apple Intelligence as a platform, but WWDC 2026 has revealed it as a ladder. Anyone who bought an iPhone, iPad or Mac with less than 12GB of memory will not have access to the full capabilities Apple has just shown the world.

That makes Apple’s rush to settle the iPhone 16 Apple Intelligence mis-selling case look rather more interesting. The timing now looks less like tidying up an old legal nuisance and more like clearing the runway before the next hardware eligibility problem arrived in public.

Naturally, this was not placed at the centre of the keynote. It was swept into a brief slide near the end of Craig Federighi’s presentation, where the most awkward facts usually go to die quietly. A bit like 2025, when he spent 45 seconds addressing AI and said “we have the best LLM models of anyone, ever.” Thanks Craig, what you didn’t say is that you were going to screw over your customers a year later.

If there was a white flag moment, that was it.

Apple has failed to make its most advanced on-device intelligence work across much of the hardware it spent the last two years selling as AI-ready. The next move now looks obvious: turn engineering failure into an upgrade cycle, then ask customers to pay again for the version of Apple Intelligence they thought they had already bought.

I’m imagining a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave asks Hal, the computer running the space station, to “open the Pod Bay Doors.” Hal replies, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.”

In this new script Dave would ask why, and Hal (or Siri) would reply “because you have to upgrade to iCloud+ before I can talk to you any more. Which credit card would you like me to use to process your charge?”

**Without an iCloud+ subscription and 12GB of RAM, Dave isn’t going to get SIri to open the pod bay doors.**

Apple‘s new motto seems to be: “never knowingly undercharging or over delivering.”

This is the result when you buyback shares instead of spending on R&D, don’t invest in CapEx and finally have to give in completely, buy servers off NVIDIA for $1M each and rent rack space from Google because you don’t have any of your own.

To everyone who applauded Apple for avoiding capex expenditure and blowing $90B a year on share buybacks, this is what that bought the company:

the loss of its own AI stack, and having to charge its customers for Siri. Poor value, if you ask me, and a sad testament to the company that used to “think different.”