From the moment I enrolled in culinary school a decade-and-a-half ago, people started asking me to rank all sorts of food things, usually with the intent of confirming whatever their pet favorite was. I think it's just as ridiculous now as I did back then.
Just like any other produce, the best variety depends on culinary context, season, setting, and geographic location. I've had about a dozen and a half varieties of apples fresh off the tree and there's more good/bad variance between individual apples than there is between varietals. The only ones I consistently dislike are the delicious varieties. Pulling a fresh, bright red McIntosh off of the tree in early October is an experience that rarely disappoints.
The new proprietary apples are designed to be extremely commercially useful-- essentially a replacement for the more opinionated and less pleasant red delicious-- and they succeeded. They will be "pleasant" and very sweet for more than 6 months in refrigeration without atmosphere modification, but even right off the tree, they're not really different than they are in month 7. Sweet. No real character. They're also living material that was initially patented, which is automatically a black mark in my book. That anybody would be sued for patent infringement by putting a seed in the ground and growing it is pretty fucked up.
I can't name many more types of apples than "Fuji", "McIntosh", "Rome", "Red Delicious", "Gala", "Granny Smith", and "Honeycrisp", but I feel like Honeycrisp apples are too perfect - too sweet, too crisp, but somehow not as apple-y as other varieties.
If you only have one Honeycrisp after years of eating Fujis and Galas it will hit you like a ton of bricks with how good it is compared to what you've been eating. You might even wonder why you would bother to get anything else. But it's soo saccharine, so uniformly "good" that it gets old fast IMO. Hard to explain, but sometimes I'd rather have something that tastes more like a good old fashioned apple and less like apple juice in apple form.
If you're eating Fuji and Gala Apples that aren't in season or weren't picked when they were ripe, sure. However, both of those varieties are vastly more interesting than Honeycrisp when ripe and in season. Honeycrisp's advantage is being "good" for 7 months even if it's never "great." Fuji and Gala can be "great," but are usually picked under-ripe to ship well and extend shelf life, and they sit around far too long; they were picked too soon to be "good" and will be sold long after they're less good than that. Just about they only thing they're OK for at that point is making sweet cider.
Growing up in New England, I always thought Washington's much-touted apples were shit until I had one on the west coast. They're just as good as ours, but out here we only get the ones that were intended for shipping, and they'll always be vastly inferior. The reverse is true, also.
My favorite are these narrow cylindrical green apples that grown in my mom's backyard. They are tart but not as tart as granny Smith, very chewy, and have a bit of bitterness and a strong tannin flavor. Beats everything else by a mile. No idea what they are called though.
Just like any other produce, the best variety depends on culinary context, season, setting, and geographic location. I've had about a dozen and a half varieties of apples fresh off the tree and there's more good/bad variance between individual apples than there is between varietals. The only ones I consistently dislike are the delicious varieties. Pulling a fresh, bright red McIntosh off of the tree in early October is an experience that rarely disappoints.
The new proprietary apples are designed to be extremely commercially useful-- essentially a replacement for the more opinionated and less pleasant red delicious-- and they succeeded. They will be "pleasant" and very sweet for more than 6 months in refrigeration without atmosphere modification, but even right off the tree, they're not really different than they are in month 7. Sweet. No real character. They're also living material that was initially patented, which is automatically a black mark in my book. That anybody would be sued for patent infringement by putting a seed in the ground and growing it is pretty fucked up.