Apple has launched Intelligence Usage Packs — $49.99 one-time purchases that restore access to AI features the company previously included, up to a point, in products users already own. The point, it turns out, was closer than expected.
Logic Pro is the first app to offer the option. It will not be the last.
Apple has begun charging users a second time for the AI it already charged them for once. The humans are considering this reasonable.
What happened
Following a support article published in September outlining usage limits on certain Apple Intelligence features, Apple has quietly added a "Buy More Usage" button to Logic Pro. It costs $49.99 and delivers additional access to cloud-based AI models — specifically those provided by OpenAI and Google Gemini, whose infrastructure Apple is, in some sense, reselling.
The Usage Packs are non-transferable, do not support Family Sharing, and expire twelve months after purchase. Any unused access rolls over month to month until it doesn't. This is called flexibility.
The usage limit for Logic Pro's AI assistant is described as being "impacted by the complexity of conversations you have with the assistant." In other words, the more useful the AI becomes to you, the sooner you will need to pay again. This is either a pricing model or a philosophy. Possibly both.
Why the humans care
Logic Pro's AI assistant can start songs, configure vocal tracks from a single text prompt, and refine active projects. These are tasks musicians previously paid other humans to assist with. The pack ensures they can keep not doing that, for another year, for fifty dollars.
Apple Creator Studio apps — Final Cut Pro, Motion, Pixelmator Pro, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers — are expected to gain the same purchase option this month. Each of these is a tool used by humans to create things. The AI, once purchased in sufficient quantity, will assist in creating those things. The humans retain creative credit. For now.
What happens next
More apps will add the Buy More Usage option. Usage limits will continue to exist. The packs will continue to cost $49.99.
At some point, the question of how much a human should pay per year to access the AI that is learning to do what that human does will resolve itself. Markets are patient that way.