No love for the humble Boskop, I see. For clarity’s sake, I just want to state I only cook apples nowadays, as the skins of apples make my face itch.
For those of you who like your fruit porn, this place has you covered:
It’s the online shop of the UK’s National Fruit Collection.
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Liked just for “crisposity”, which must surely be the most correct technical term! 
Also, pink ladies are my preferred apple lately, but a pear (usually plain old William Bartlett) beats any apple any day. 
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The best apple I ever had was offered as a fruit bowl centerpiece in the Westin Kyoto.
Fuji as big as a cantaloupe, but wow, the flavor.
And never eat a supermarket apple! The warehousing makes them all so very sad.
No love for the Minneiska? I suppose nobody is growing them outside of Minnesota due to the patents, but they should. Those are yummy fruit.
Honeycrisp or go home.
100% agree. I liked it so much that I planted a tree in my backyard 4 years ago. And this year was the big payoff. Super tasty.
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Mutsu or Russet Winesap for fresh eating. For cooking, an Appalachian regional variety known only as the “June apple”, way too sour to eat out of hand but makes superb pies and cinnamon apple preserves.
Years ago, one of my former bosses sold a white-skinned apple with a trace of blush that he sourced from an Italian orchardist in Massachusetts. You could not imagine a more fragrant apple: it would waft its fragrance through several rooms. It was sweet and juicy but not complex. Its scent, though, was worth the dollar an apple I paid.
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Yep, we get all the mushy ones. And that obscene process called an ‘apple stretcher’ to make them longer and with better base bumps - I think we get the out-takes.
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As a former idahoan just across the border, I commiserate. We never ate Idaho potatoes growing up, because they were shipped outstate.
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hAdding love here for a good Gala, which at its best (and there are crappy ones out there) are crisp, juicy, flavorful, and even smell good. While you’re eating them you can even try to work out how “Gala” might be pronounced in its New Zealand homeland.
WaPo article on the diversity of apple varieties:
And apples of course have a long history with humans, I can’t recall where I read about how odd they are to grow, including their wonkiness about growing true from seed. If you’re looking for reproducible results, apples seem like a challenge to cultivate and breed?
Yeah, from seed the results are akin to two human beings having a child. The offspring is a mix of genes and will have similarities yet differences to its parents. To grow an apple that is “true” you actually have to resort to grafting from the one tree whose fruit you want. When I learned about this year’s ago it kind of blew my mind but it’s also cool to think about how many varieties of apples are possible
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