Apple's head of iCloud infrastructure technology departs

Signalling Apple's plans to reduce dependency on external Cloud services, the company's executive Eric Billingsley, who was in charge of operating infrastructure for iCloud services, including the iCloud Drive document storage service, has left the company.

Billingsley's old team now reports to engineering vice-president Patrice Gautier, CNBC reported citing industry sources late Friday.
Billingsley's group relied to a degree on external public Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to handle the computing needs of iCloud services.

Data centre infrastructure in the past had been "a bit of a problem child", a source was quoted as saying.

Patrick Gates, another executive who reports to Gautier and runs infrastructure for some services including Siri, has been "righting the ship", the source added.

A major AWS outage in February had impacted Apple Music, iCloud services and iTunes among other services.

Billingsley, who had earlier worked with eBay and Google joined Apple in 2013. His exit could signal Apple's plans to depend less on external Cloud services and more on its own data centre infrastructure as part of its "Project McQueen".
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Apple shares at record high on better than expected iPhone sales

Apple Inc on Tuesday delivered surprisingly strong third-quarter earnings and signalled that its upcoming 10th-anniversary phone lineup is on schedule, driving the stock up 6 per cent to an all-time high in after-hours trading.

The stock climbed above its intraday record high to $159.10 after the company reported better-than-expected iPhone sales, revenue and earnings per share. The stock price move was expected to help drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the 22,000 mark on Wednesday.

Apple also said it hit a milestone of 1.2 billion iPhones sold.

The April-June quarter is traditionally a soft one for Apple as the market waits for the September launch of new iPhone models. But Tuesday’s results show that iPhone buyers may be less inclined than they once were to delay purchases until a new model is out.

The iPad product lines also showed unexpected strength, service revenue continues to grow at a healthy clip, and even the much-maligned Apple Watch showed a 50 per cent sales increase.

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