In fancy math-talk, we can say apples are a semimodule over the semiring of natural numbers.

• You can add two bunches of apples through the well-known "glomming-together" operation.
• You can multiply a bunch of apples by any natural number.
• Multiplication distributes over both natural-number addition and glomming-together.
• Multiplication-of-apples is associative with multiplication-of-numbers.
• 1 is an identity with regard to multiplication-of-apples.

You could quibble that there is a finite supply of apples out there, so that (3 apples) + (all the apples) is undefined, but this model ought to work well enough for small collections of apples.