Michael Abbott, Apple’s top executive in charge of cloud initiatives is leaving the company in April, adding to a wave of recent departures.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Abbott will be the second top lieutenant to services chief Eddy Cue to leave this year, joining a growing list of company vice presidents who have departed the iPhone maker in late 2022 and early 2023.
As Apple’s vice president of cloud engineering, he’s in charge of the iCloud.com service, iCloud Mail and new features like iCloud data encryption. He also runs the company’s platform that powers iCloud, key communication services, the Find My feature and Emergency SOS on iPhones.
The executive is one of a handful of Cue’s direct reports, a list that includes the heads of Apple TV+ content, music, financial services, maps, advertising and productivity apps. He also runs CloudKit, a service that developers can use to power third-party apps, and software offerings for both education and enterprise users. And he’s in charge of privacy and security engineering for Apple’s services.
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.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck in your future endeavors, Mr. Abbott. Onward and upward, Apple!
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
Eddy Cue impresses me as having a somewhat cocky or cavalier personality. He may be a difficult boss.
It’s obvious the numerous high level executive resignations reporting to Cook and Cue the last ten years, reflects a near dead creative company overly concerned with incremental upgrades, profits and woke politics.
Scott Forstall the heir apparent according to Time Magazine and right hand of Steve Jobs fellow creative genius, was forced out for a minor infraction negating decades of development of Apple’s most important products and software. That’s just WRONG!
Under Cook, Apple has lost its way in so many ways. A top down executive review is long overdue by the brainless board including sky is falling Al Gore, what a waste of a board chair.
Cook must GO and the rest of the executive team reviewed and put on notice for creative excellence and timely product releases…
“Woke politics?” I hear the KKK is launching a new tech initiative where you can purchase your next phone, tablet, whatever from them while receiving a complimentary appetizer from Chick Fill’ A and a new pen from Hobby Lobby.
Dude, that is uncalled for…and it kind of makes you sound exactly like you’re portraying him — I’ll assume — with the KKK and the chicken stereotypes. For one, he is correct, since Cook took over he sort of went into a publicity tour whereas Jobs rarely did. And all that Apple has produced since then isn’t useful like it used it, it’s more on the shallow side — of which Apple already had plenty.
Since Cook took over right from the beginning, Mojave, he started making subtle changes to monopolize everything Appla touches and let you own nothing while lying to our faces that it’s all in the name of privacy; specifically Apple’s guarding and having exclusive access to your privacy so it can monetize it without having to share the revenue. Not that would be better if everybody had access to it, like on Android, but at least it’s can be equally violated for all participants.
Apple already is being investigated for that and people is starting to come to terms with it too. It’s no surprise executives are fleeing.
As for Forstall, I agree that it was wrong that he was ousted, sure, the skeuomorphic design was starting to get old, but in all fairness it was a whole concept that was created from scratch. When the other went the other direction, “flat design” because it’s easy to draw and look clean. The first iteration was horrible and didn’t get much better, it started getting bloated while Apple played catch up “but better” thanks to the reputation Jobs built and a slew of obsessive late-to-the-party fanatical YouTubers.
Apple lost its edge and it’s following Microsoft footsteps since then; locking things down for monopoly, forcing updates, subscriptions, selling remotely-lockable cellphone chips in computers (and in phones) at exceedingly high prices, “innovating” by using massive amounts of cash to solve (catch up) problems in seemingly simple ways but with tons of anticompetitive engineering in the back e.g; AirPlay 2, MFA, iCloud, Activation Lock. On all of that, Apple is still number 1. Wouldn’t you leave?
My, oh my! Would you believe it!
Apple is the now the Microsoft they once looked down on. Does anyone expect any real innovations and true tech leadership coming from Apple ? Apple is safe and boring and socially sanitized. Expect that part where they do business and bend the knee to the criminal state of the CCP. In that regard, Apple is gutsy as hell.