But why do they want to charge based on usage? Their users are already subscribed. It’s not like they run cloud services or anything. There is literally no cost to them except for the self imposed analytics stuff.

That’s a very good point re: privacy. ARKit does work really well for scene detection like the room shapes, plane detection stuff etc but I was mostly thinking about the VisionKit stuff too (not the VisionOS ones) wheee you want to be smart about things. E.g. if you want to be able to detect text in mixed reality (like real time translation) or if you want to recognize objects not just by their shape.

It is going to be a privacy nightmare I agree but it is also severely limiting the possibilities of the software right now

Was eading up on the use cases for this, one of the big ones is mixed or augmented reality. But they don’t give developers access to the cameras yet. There isn’t really much you can do with it outsode of games like the Oculus but they aren’t marketing it as such.