Apple

Apples are food objects found in Alpha and Beta mode. There are two types of Apples: Golden Apples and Red Apples.

Red Apples
Red apples can normally only be found in a Dungeon Chest. They can be eaten for a small amount of health regained or can be used to make Golden Apples. They can also be dropped by leaves in some SMP servers, due to a plugin.

Notch also drops red apples when he dies in SMP.

Golden Apples
Golden Apples are apples coated with gold. Eating one fully restores your health. They can be found in dungeons on rare occasions.

Crafting
You can craft a gold apple from a red apple and 8 Gold blocks surrounding it:

Advantages

 * Golden apples restore all your health.

Disadvantages

 * Regular apples are very rare and, as they only heal 2, are not worth looking for.
 * Even though a golden apple restores all your health, it is a waste of time and resources since making one requires 72 gold ingots. Before the 1.2 Beta update, Gold was quite useless except for decoration and to make a Clock so players who had a plentiful supply sometimes created golden apples as vanity items.
 * Since the introduction of cake in a beta update on January 13 2011, eating cake is the most efficient way to regain health.