Former Apple Executive Tim Bucher Has a Role in Sansa’s New iPod Competitor

Eddie Hargreaves at The Apple Blog:

SanDisk has launched a Wi-Fi-enabled MP3 player, Sansa Connect, and a central player in its creation is Zing, a company co-founded by former Apple executive Tim Bucher.

Bucher, you may recall, was named head of Apple’s Macintosh hardware engineering division in 2004 after Jon Rubinstein left that position to head up the then-new iPod division. Six months later, MDJ broke the story that Bucher had been fired under mysterious circumstances. In 2005, Bucher filed a wrongful termination suit against Apple, claiming, amongst other things, that Steve Jobs had told him, “People sometimes think you are manic-depressive. … I’m not sure what I am going to do, but I think I am going to have to ask you to leave the company.”

Anyway, this Sansa player looks interesting — the Wi-Fi feature lets you browse pictures from Flickr and download songs directly from Yahoo’s subscription-based music service.

★ Wednesday, 11 April 2007