Apple’s chief of cloud services, Michael Abbott plans to depart the company at the end of April according to Bloomberg. He is the second senior executive the company’s services division is losing to depart this year.
In January 2023, Apple’s former VP of Services Peter Stern left after serving six years. He had helped in building subscription services like TV+, News+, Fitness+, iCloud, Apple Arcade, Books, Apple One, and others. Stern was also behind the recent expansion of the Sports catalog for TV+.
He directly reported to Eddy Cue, the Senior VP of Services, and was also viewed as his possible successor. It was claimed that he left amidst the restructuring of the company’s Services department into three divisions.
Apple VP Jeff Robbin to step into the role of the departing in charge of cloud, Michael Abbott
As per the report, Michael Abbott will be leaving after five years at the company. His responsibilities include all cloud-related products including iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Find My, Emergency SOS on iPhone, and the backend of other important apps.
Being in charge of iCloud, Abbott’s responsibilities included iCloud.com, iCloud Mail, iCloud data encryption, Find My, Emergency SOS on iPhone, CloudKit, and the infrastructure behind iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime. Beyond iCloud, the executive was also in charge of privacy and security engineering for Apple’s services.
It is also detailed that Abbott hired new talent to strengthen the cloud division but the transition did not go smoothly as expected.
The cloud services group had invested heavily in building an infrastructure to power its offerings. But more recently, the company has pared back that effort in favor of using servers hosted by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Abbott’s group oversees a custom layer that sits on top of that infrastructure to optimize it for Apple’s offerings.
In recent years, Abbott has hired several cloud industry leaders to bolster Apple’s operations, but the integration of the new talent hasn’t gone as smoothly as some within the company had hoped, people familiar with the effort said.
Allegedly, Apple’s VP Jeff Robbin is going to step into Abbott’s role. He is the creator of iTunes and a veteran of the company.
Abbott’s responsibilities will be taken over by Jeff Robbin, who is regarded as one of Apple’s most senior engineering leaders and credited with creating iTunes. Robbin has long managed engineering for several services offerings under Cue.
In the past six months, the tech company has lost heads of online retail store and information systems, Anna Matthiasson and Mary Demby, vice president in charge of industrial design, Evans Hankey who was Jony Ives’ successor, and vice president of procurement Tony Blevins after his controversial TikTok video went viral.
