Apple doesn’t make formal product announcements or discuss future product plans during its quarterly financial results announcements. But every once in a while, it shares some details that offer a peek at what’s coming.

During Thursday’s Q3 2026 financial call, Apple indicated the higher iCloud+ tiers could be on the way. While it has already said it will offer some kind of iCloud+ tie-in to accommodate heavy AI usage, when Goldman Sachs’ Michael Ng asked about Apple Intelligence and “compute costs and the ability to recover some of those costs through iCloud+,” Apple CEO Tim Cook had this response:

In terms of what it means for compute cost, it’s obviously early going for us, and so I don’t want to say that we have a complete plan for that. We do believe there will be people that want to use it a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+ where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is. But we could not be more excited about where the product is.

Details about the “upgrade possibilities” weren’t provided, but Apple’s plans aren’t a surprise. At WWDC26 last June, Apple demonstrated several AI features and noted that there would be daily usage limits, which expanded access available through iCloud+. But at that time, no further details were provided.

Apple is expected to officially release iOS 27 in September, around the same time the company unveils the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra. Apple will likely announce these new iCloud+ plans at the same time. It’s unclear as to what Apple will offer to accommodate AI usage; iCloud+ currently offers 5GB of free storage, with upgrade plans up to 12TB, though other AI companies offer storage up to 100GB. It sounds like Apple will explore these higher storage options for iCloud+ plans primarily built for AI use.

In an era where social media seems to be doing more harm than good, the Minimal Phone 2 seems like a really good idea. Billed as a distraction-free device, it’s a mobile phone with a physical keyboard that offers no social media access and only basic apps, including the ability to send and receive messages.

However, it’s still an Android phone, so when you send a chat message from the Minimal Phone 2, it naturally appears in a green bubble on an iPhone. As silly as it sounds, there’s a stigma that some iPhone users attach to Android phone users because iOS displays chat messages from Android phones as green bubbles instead of blue ones, the telltale indication that a message came from an Apple device.

There’s a fix for that, though, in case you’re worried about being a social outcast by your iPhone buddies. Andre Youkhna, the founder of The Minimal Company, points out that the Minimal Phone 2 can run OpenBubbles, which means messages for the phone appear as blue bubbles on iPhones. It even has a blue blinking indicator light on the front to let you know when one arrives.

OpenBubbles is an app that basically spoofs a Mac or iPhone that you can access, so that an Android phone can access Apple’s Messages, FaceTime, and iCloud Shared Albums (though it’s not clear if the latter two can be accessed by the Minimal Phone 2). If you don’t have an Apple device to spoof, you can sign up for OpenBubbles Hosted, which is $16.99 per month.

Doesn’t OpenBubble sound like something Apple would disapprove of? OpenBubbles has been around since 2020, so Apple would’ve sicced its lawyers on the company by now if it cared at all. Learn more about OpenBubbles. If you want to jump on the waitlist for Minimal Phone 2, you can sign up on the Minimal website.