Since no one has mentioned them in the first 6 or seven pages of comments, I will venture a comment. When baking apple pies (which I have done every fall for perhaps 35 years, I want my apple filling to be sweet and not sour ("tart"), soft, but with a good consistency, where I can see the individual apple slices, and the filling has not turned into applesauce.
After all my years, I've settled on the one apple that I feel is the best, and it is now the ONLY apple I will bake with, no matter how hard I have to look to find them. They are called Rome Beauty apples, or Red Rome, or sometimes just Rome apples. They have a distinctive, aromatic nutty taste, beautiful white flesh, and they hold their shape beautifully in a pie without being crispy or turning to liquid.
I urge eveyone to give these "beauties" a try!

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