Apple VP Overseeing iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime Infrastructure Leaving Role

Apple's vice president of cloud engineering Michael Abbott plans to leave the company in April, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The report notes that Abbott oversees Apple's cloud infrastructure for services like iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, and others.

iCloud General Feature
Abbott joined Apple in 2018 and was previously an executive at tech companies such as Twitter, Microsoft, and Palm. The report claims that his team at Apple had invested heavily in building out the company's in-house cloud infrastructure, but scaled back the efforts in favor of using servers hosted by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

Apple's vice president of services Peter Stern, who oversaw iCloud as a whole, also left the company earlier this year. Stern worked at Apple for over six years and was viewed as a potential successor to Apple's longtime services chief Eddy Cue.

Update: The role will be taken over by Jeff Robbin, a longtime Apple engineering VP known as the creator of iTunes, according to Gurman.

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Top Rated Comments

TVreporter Avatar
18 months ago
Relax, he's focused now - his head is no longer in the clouds.
Score: 29 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jaw04005 Avatar
18 months ago
Not sure Abbott's role, but iCloud is absolutely the worst product of Apple's services division. The product is convoluted, unreliable, slow and behind its competitors in areas like collaboration and sharing.
Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)
SkyRom Avatar
18 months ago
Thank God. Now that I think about it, each one of those services has only gotten slower, laggier, more bloated, and less secure in the last 3-5 years. Now if they can just soft-fire whoever decided to make the Ventura settings menu look like an iPhone we might be in business.

[edit] And whoever is responsible for the abominations known as Mail, Pages, and Numbers.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
TheYayAreaLiving ?️ Avatar
18 months ago
Hopefully, the new person in charge can bring ? imessages to ☁️ iCloud online. It needs to be expediated.
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MaaK Avatar
18 months ago
The more people leave that have Eddy Cue as their supervisor, the more I think he should be fired. This guy is overrated AF and just wants to be in the spotlight. Apple should finally get rid of him already.
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)
PsykX Avatar
18 months ago
Might actually be a good thing...

It's not like iCloud is the most stable Cloud solution ever.
I hear people losing their stuff every day in that thing, including myself.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)