I think maybe this is where the polarisation of those who find chatGPT useful and those who don't comes from. In this context, the number of r's in strawberry is not a fact: its a calculation. I would expect AI to be able to spell a common word 100% of the time, but not to be able to count letters. I don't think in the summary of human knowledge that has been digitised there are that many people saying 'how many r's are there in strawberry', and if they are I think that the common reply would be '2', since the context is based on the second r. (people confuse strawbery and strawberry, not strrawberry and strawberry).

Your apples question is the same, its not knowledge, it's a calculation, it's intelligence. The only time you're going to get intelligence from AI at the moment is to ask a question that a significantly large number of people have already answered.