HomeKit Camera Search Needs 2TB iCloud+ Plan to Work

Apple’s smarter HomeKit camera tools, arriving in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate, come with a subscription floor that most users won’t already meet. To use the new Apple Intelligence features in the Home app, you need at least the 2TB iCloud+ tier, which runs $9.99 per month.

The features themselves are genuinely useful. The Home app gains written summaries for motion alerts, the ability to group footage across multiple cameras, highlighted recordings, and natural language search across security footage. That last one matters most practically: instead of scrubbing through clips, users can describe what they’re looking for and let the system find it.

What the 2TB Plan Actually Covers

The 2TB requirement isn’t arbitrary. That tier is also the entry point for unlimited HomeKit Secure Video cameras, so Apple is bundling the intelligence layer with the existing top-tier camera support. HomeKit Secure Video storage has never counted against the iCloud+ limit, so the full 2TB remains available for photos, backups, and files.

The pairing of server-side AI with a paid storage tier follows a pattern Apple has been building toward. Features that rely on Apple’s servers rather than on-device processing carry a recurring cost, and tying them to iCloud+ gives Apple a clean way to gate access without creating a separate subscription category.

What’s less clean is the gap this creates for users already paying for HomeKit Secure Video on lower iCloud+ tiers. The 50GB and 200GB plans support one and five cameras respectively, but those subscribers won’t get the Intelligence layer regardless of how many cameras they run. For them, the Home app in iOS 27 gets smarter tools that remain just out of reach unless they upgrade.