25 questions Apple asked in a job interview

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Apple, one of the most sought-after companies for fresh graduates and working men, is notorious for its mind-boggling questions. Business Insider has collected some of the toughest interview questions and we have shortlisted half of them:

Engineering:

1. “We have a cup of hot coffee and a small cold milk out of the fridge. The room temperature is in between these two. When should we add milk to the coffee to get the coolest combination earliest (at the beginning, in the middle or at the end)?” – product design engineer candidate.

2. “How does an airplane wing work?” – lead systems engineer candidate.

3. “Draw the inside architecture of an iPhone” – hardware test design lead candidate.

4. “Give me five ways of measuring how much gasoline is in a car” – hardware engineering candidate.

5.  “If you have two eggs, and you want to figure out what’s the highest floor from which you can drop the egg without breaking it, how would you do it? What’s the optimal solution?” – software engineer candidate.

6. “Describe an interesting problem and how you solved it” – software engineer candidate.

7. “Are you creative? What’s something creative that you can think of?” – software engineer candidate.

8. “You have 100 coins laying flat on a table, each with a head side and a tail side. Ten of them are heads up, 90 are tails up. You can’t feel, see or in any other way find out which side is up. Split the coins into two piles such that there are the same number of heads in each pile” –  software engineer candidate.

9. “How would you test your favourite app?” – software QA engineer candidate.

10. “There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labelled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?” – software QA engineer candidate.

11. “You put a glass of water on a record turntable and begin slowly increasing the speed. What happens first – does the glass slide off, tip over, or does the water splash out? – mechanical engineer candidate.

12. “Tell me something that you have done in your life which you are particularly proud of” – software engineering manager candidate.

13. “Are you smart?” – build engineer candidate.

14. “What was your best day in the last four years? What was your worst?” – engineering project manager candidate.

Research:

15. “How do you check if a binary tree is a mirror image on left and right sub-trees?” – research scientist candidate.

16. “If you’re given a jar with a mix of fair and unfair coins, and you pull one out and flip it three times, and get the specific sequence heads heads tails, what are the chances that you pulled out a fair or an unfair coin?” – lead analyst candidate.

Retail:

17. “What superhero would you be and why?” – retail candidate.

18. “How much does the Empire State Building weigh?” – solutions consultant candidate.

19. “A man calls in and has an older computer that is essentially a brick. What do you do?” – Apple care at-home consultant candidate.

20. “Explain what RAM is to a five year old” – Apple genius candidate.

21. “Describe a humbling experience” – Apple retail specialist candidate.

22. “What’s more important, fixing the customer’s problem or creating a good customer experience?” – Apple at-home advisor candidate.

23. “How would you break down the cost of this pen?” – global supply manager candidate.

24. “Why did Apple change its name from Apple Computers Incorporated to Apple Inc?” – specialist candidate.

25. “How many children are born every day?” – global supply manager candidate.

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