I have four different RD, and they're just now starting to turn red, but yours is nowhere near that stage. Where did you buy your tree?

I bought it near a town called Oak Glenn in Southern California at a respectable small chain nursery. Oak Glenn is a large producer of perfect apples and cider. I called the nursery and they said that it might be it's first year fruiting (and while potted) and that it may take another year to be true. In Oak Glenn temperatures in summer are between 80 and 100. Frost doesn't happen till around Dec 1st. It does cool down with a couple days of snow in late winter but not much snow, just cold breezes. Thanks for taking a look.

M 111 is not a "compact" tree. Average size of an apple tree on a M 111 rootstock is 18-22 ft tall. The tree you bought has set fruit very early. Usually, it takes several years for an apple tree on M 111 to bear fruit.

Check the color of the seeds of those apple. If they are dark brown or black, the fruit are ripe. Ripe apples of the color in the pic are more like Golden Delicious than Red Delicious. It could be any variety of yellow skin apples.

Even a reputable nursery makes mistakes.

You have a yellow skin apple on a compact rootstock that were allowed to set too many fruit at a young age. That could stunt the tree's growth or resuit in the tree skip having fruit (biennial) next year.

I think you have a mislabeled tree, and the nursery is dodging you.

rphcfb14, I respectfully disagree. I have 9 apples on M111 and 8 out of 9 set fruit on the second year in ground and were planted as bench grafts, basically just a bud on a rootstock. My pink lady set fruit its first year. I culled most of the fruit but there are still apples ripening on all the trees.

The seeds inside are half white half light brown with some nearly fully light brown. I don't know how to pollinate it next year if I don't know what kind of apple it is. I'm going to keep it though.

Retailers that aren't selling stock they have produced themselves depend on suppliers to send them the correct items. However that bit about the fruits changing in a subsequent year, not being true to type at this time because the specimen is small is hogwash*. It is in fact fruiting already (despite still being a little stick) because it has the sexual maturity - and other characteristics - of the bud-wood source tree. So there is no youthfulness involved. It is a piece of the source tree stuck onto a root-stock, and not a separate genetic individual, raised from seed and not fruiting until it reaches sexual maturity.

Even then a seedling that was destined to produce red apples wouldn't have a few years where it was producing predominantly yellow ones beforehand.

*Like most retailers garden shops and other nurseries selling directly to the public often hire and present people to shoppers who have little serious background in what goods are being offered. Large garden centers may have multiple cashiers answering phones who have pretty much no gardening and nursery background at all. Even supervisory or other long term employees with more subject area knowledge and training may embrace and repeat false notions, this is not unusual.

I hope it turns red. I'm going to buy another red delicious from a different nursery. I bet I won't be able to pollinate this one next year if it isn't a red delicious.

Oh and what can I do to get it to branch out more?

If you want it to assume a tree shape with a single trunk of some length and an elevated head of branches you don't want it to branch yet anyway.

I want it to stay under 8 feet tall and not that wide branch to branch.

They all are starting to turn red. They look like softer pink ladies (yellow red) now.