If Schmidhuber had really found everything he says he found, the Singularity would've happened decades ago.

You know, if it were anyone else I would probably ignore this comment, but you seem to do your homework, to put it mildly. Are you saying he's, uh, misrepresenting himself?

(I like Schmidhuber but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really evaluate his work or claims.)

he's had a decades-long tendency to just say that stuff has been invented before, sometimes by him, sometimes by obscure russians, that one time by Gauss. sometimes he's right, more of the time he's materially wrong, all of the time he's got no social sense.

To be fair, it’s not just him. Whenever I gave a poster at a conference, there was a chance that someone with a Russian sounding name would call the work trivial and say they had already published it in the nineties ;). Of course, on closer inspection that was not the case.

I don’t fully understand the tendency to do so, but it appears to be fairly widespread.

Is there anything that schmidhuber hasn't done before everyone else?

Remote work.

So he was a good culture fit for apple then?