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

[MacRumors]

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.

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.

Article Link: Apple VP Overseeing iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime Infrastructure Leaving Role

 

[TVreporter]

Relax, he's focused now - his head is no longer in the clouds.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Relax, he's focused now - his head is no longer in the clouds.

LMAO ... nicely done.

But honestly so many people hate Eddie on these forums yet never understood the magnitude of the work he's put int and dealt with from the start. This guy leaves with just half of what Eddie Cue used to fully manage and oversea ... much of which he managed directly.

 

[PsykX]

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.

 

[jaw04005]

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.

 

[thelonelylimo]

John Stauffer left in December, then Peter Stern and now Abbott. Must be a dark cloud.

 

[SkyRom]

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.

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

Hopefully, the new person in charge can bring 💭 imessages to ☁️ iCloud online. It needs to be expediated.

 

[contacos]

Good, maybe I will be able to delete iCloud Messages photos and have them actually stay deleted eventually. Sometimes it feels like these people don’t use their own services they r in charge of cuz otherwise … how do you explain all these issues

 

[MaaK]

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.

 

[mxrider88]

Good!!!!!! Who knows maybe now they can get it to actually sync.

 

[ersan191]

Maybe now they'll make iCloud Drive a serious competitor to Dropbox/OneDrive

 

[klasma]

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.

Apple could have so many “wins” by improving the everyday applications, but instead they make dynamic islands, MR goggles, iOSsify macOS, try to measure blood pressure (might actually be useful when using their software).

 

[npmacuser5]

I was getting tired of working for Mr. Abbott /s. The hours I have spent recovering files, losing files, messed up photos, not syncing properly, required logins, contacting Apple Support, reinstalling systems and app’s. I am ready for a return to “just works”.

 

[Unami]

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.

I'm with you on ventura's idiotic settings menu. As fir pages and numbers... at least it's not microsoft office - just yesterday I opened Pages and noted to myself how happy I am that this isn't the bloatet UI-Clusterf*** that MS-Word is.

Sometimes it feels like these people don’t use their own services they r in charge of cuz otherwise … how do you explain all these issues

I'd bet that Tim Cook has an assistant who fixes all that crap for him. Pretty sure Cook has never to deal with stuff like Music interrupting playback for a second every other song, sharing a google calendar with others or Siri denying doing "thing A", but when you rephrase your request saying "doing thing A".

 

[coolfactor]

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.

There's a saying with technology ... the problem is often between the chair and the keyboard.

PEBCAK - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

en.wiktionary.org

I've personally never lost anything in over 22 years with Apple's cloud services ... through .Mac to MobileMe to iCloud. All contacts, bookmarks, files, mail ... smooth transition every time.

 

[howywood]

Good riddance. Syncing is terrible and buggy AF.

 

[coolfactor]

Maybe now they'll make iCloud Drive a serious competitor to Dropbox/OneDrive

The biggest difference with iCloud vs these other services — iCloud has historically been bundled with hardware. You buy the hardware, and get these convenient services to make them "just work".

Apple has a hardware-first business model.

Dropbox and similar services are a service-first business, designed to work with an array of hardware vendors (Macs, PCs, tablets, phones).

 

[fontman]

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.

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.

Article Link: Apple VP Overseeing iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime Infrastructure Leaving Role

What's funny is this Jeff guy and people know that iTunes was not created by Apple it was actually an existing piece of software that was purchased and then built from that that's typically what Apple does. They find a third-party that has a good product and they figured out how they can build on top of that so I wouldn't say he created iTunes unless the name counts.

 

[coolfactor]

Good riddance. Syncing is terrible and buggy AF.

Syncing of what? Be specific. We're listening.

If you're referring to iCloud files with Finder integration, then I would agree with you, but everything works amazingly well. I blame macOS for those problems, not iCloud per se.

 

[Cmukuk]

Maybe they don't like the direction Apple wants to take iCloud so leave to avoid being attached to it potential destination. I'll leave it at that.

 

[coolfactor]

What's funny is this Jeff guy and people know that iTunes was not created by Apple it was actually an existing piece of software that was purchased and then built from that that's typically what Apple does. They find a third-party that has a good product and they figured out how they can build on top of that so I wouldn't say he created iTunes unless the name counts.

Partially true. iTunes was an exception where they bought an existing app and then created iTunes from that, but they don't do that for _most_ of their products.

 

[temende]

iCloud has actually been pretty reliable for me for the past few years and I have almost ~1TB of data in iCloud. Definitely a lot better than it used to be.

My guess it that this type of infrastructure/behind-the-scenes role isn't valued highly within Apple, and he can probably get much better compensation at another company whose business model relies more heavily on cloud infrastructure engineering. (Or he could probably just retire.)

 

[FelixDerKater]

New arrival, please add a tier above 2TB for families.

 

[howywood]

Syncing of what? Be specific. We're listening.

If you're referring to iCloud files with Finder integration, then I would agree with you, but everything works amazingly well. I blame macOS for those problems, not iCloud per se.

iCloud files / Finder FOR SURE ... you can rarely download the things you want - 'no internet connection message'

Long story short I spent about 16 hours with support over the phone and via chat to come to no resolution on iCloud contacts syncing and messages syncing. We found a bug related to iCloud contact sync settings while we were troubleshooting and the tier 3 engineer answer was 'maybe we'll fix it'.

I pay a lot of money for premium products. Such support, or lack there of rather, is unjust.