Yes the basic apple peeler just ran over the outside and took off a very thin layer of skin. But the one my grandmother had (and as near as I can tell many of the ones I’ve seen since) were capable of a few different things. My grandmother’s was set up with two blades, the standard one that shaved off the skin and a separate one that sliced the apple laterally. So you ended up with a pealed apple that had been sliced into a spiral the full thickness of the fruit to the core. You were basically peeling, slicing, and coring it in one go. There was some way of adjusting it or changing the blade (I was young don’t remember) so that you could take one pass to just pull off an ultra thin peel, and if you wished take another pass to take off thicker spirals of center flesh (suitable for curly fries) with multiple passes.
My point was this thing seems far more practical for daily use (and way less finicky, the apple peeler wasn’t pleasant to use). But as I would apparently need to peel and core anything I put on it I wouldn’t want to be running a 10 tree orchard’s worth of apples through it. That’s down to the fact that it has fixed blades mounted to plastic plates and the fruit/veg is pushed into/through it. Like a mandolin, rather than the traveling blade of the apple peeler. I don’t like plastic kitchen tools, but more moving parts is usually a bad thing. Same ideal though. Spin fruit/veg into blade (we did a lot of beets too, could do them raw saved time) usable flesh results.
