"During harvest season, most people are eating a "fresh" apple that is a year old. "
The majority of the apples in the US are produced in a handful of counties in Washington and New York. Mrs Axe's cousin married one of the apple barons in our county, so I have learned a few things about the business over holiday meals.
Apple production today already uses some heavy machinery to do a lot of the work - the planting in particular is very dense and fast, putting trees about 2' apart in dense rows, and fertilizing them with very specific formulations that encourage light production in year two and full production in year three. He has teams of three people planting trees, each team planting one tree and a support every 6 seconds. A second step to bind them to support columns follows this several weeks later, and takes less than a minute per tree.
Harvesting is still done by human hands. Apple harvests spread from August to October here, with different varieties finishing in overlapping 1-2 week windows. Many of the laborers have been working on the farms for generations - one guy has been with a farm down the road for 70 years, coming here for harvest and flying home to the Dominican Republic to live off what he makes the rest of the year. The farm pays his airfare and has labor camps and buses to take the workers grocery shopping, medical care, dentists, etc.
The apples are loaded into large plastic crates roughly four feet per side. These are placed in rapid chilling units which bring the apples to exactly 32.1 degrees, then moved into longer term cold storage. The sellers store the apples and get contracts to provide apples on a regular basis to customers for the entire year. These apples will make their way all over the US, with up to 60% of the harvest exported to Europe and Asia, where prices are higher.
The cold storage rotates out the old apples and will sell at discounts when they reach the end of their storage lifetimes. Some apples can be stored as many as two years. Other varieties will only keep for a couple of months. If you're eating a generic red delicious, that may be a year old. But if you're enjoying the shorter lived Cortlands, Macouns, and Macintosh near harvest time, it's pretty fresh.
If you live in an urban area and shop at big grocery stores, you're getting year-old apples until the stores run down