JK Scheinberg. JK Scheinberg / Linkedin

JK Scheinberg, the engineer who spent 21 years working at Apple and is best known for persuading Steve Jobs to move the Mac from PowerPC to Intel in 2005, was rejected from a job at an Apple store a few years later.

He had applied to work at a Genius Bar, according to The New York Times.

The Times used it as an example of age discrimination in the workplace.

Ashton Applewhite wrote in The Times:

"I'm lucky enough to get my tech support from JK Scheinberg, the engineer at Apple who led the effort that moved the Mac to Intel processors. A little restless after retiring in 2008, at 54, he figured he'd be a great fit for a position at an Apple store Genius Bar, despite being twice as old as anyone else at the group interview. 'On the way out, all three of the interviewers singled me out and said, "We'll be in touch,"' he said. 'I never heard back.'"

Apple, notoriously, employs very young workers in its stores. It is unlikely that anyone is more qualified to work at an Apple store than Scheinberg, who ran the "Marklar" Intel project. Business Insider described Marklar in an article on the extreme culture of secrecy inside Apple:

"Kim Scheinberg tells this story about her husband, Apple employee JK, who invented an Intel version of Mac OSX that ran on PCs. Bertrand Serlet, the svp of software engineering, liked the project:

"'Bertrand sits JK down and has a talk with him about how no one can know about this. No one. Suddenly, the home office has to be reconfigured to meet Apple security standards.

"'JK points out to Bertrand that I know about the project. In fact, not only do I know about it, I am the person who named it.

"'Bertrand tells JK that I am to forget everything I know, and he will not be allowed to speak to me about it again until it is publicly announced.

"'I guess he had some kind of "Total Recall" memory wipe in mind.'"

MacRumors has a nice summary of the story too. It begins with Scheinberg realising that he could use an off-the-shelf Sony PC to run a version of Mac OS X, the Apple desktop operating system:

"Bertrand walks in, watches the PC boot up, and says to JK, 'How long would it take you to get this running on a (Sony) Vaio?' JK replies, 'Not long' and Bertrand says, 'Two weeks? Three?'

"JK said more like two *hours*. Three hours, tops.

"Bertrand tells JK to go to Fry's (the famous West Coast computer chain) and buy the top of the line, most expensive Vaio they have. So off JK, Max and I go to Frys. We return to Apple less than an hour later. By 7:30 that evening, the Vaio is running the Mac OS. [My husband disputes my memory of this and says that Matt Watson bought the Vaio. Maybe Matt will chime in.]

"The next morning, Steve Jobs is on a plane to Japan to meet with the President of Sony."

Scheinberg later tweeted: