I can "pull up" some pictures of things but it is definitely work and something I have to consciously do. It's just for a few more common objects, like the "apple" thing or "pink elephant" that everyone always asks. And the pictures are vague, or more like the little sketches you see in a dictionary. It's just easier to not try to "see" things. Funny, I always assumed I was just "lazy" for not doing the mental work to pull up pictures.

My wife would see an apple like she could reach out and touch it. She's on the other side of the spectrum: she has hyperphantasia. She would also see the table the apple is on, see the kitchen around it, smell the apple, and hear the sounds of a kitchen. Basically, she IS there. Personally, I don't even see a faint design of the apple. I would describe my experience as looking at a wall of black glass. I can detect the apple and I know it's there, but I can't actually see it. Oddly, when I'm half awake, I can have a lucid dream where I can "punch holes" in the wall and see the object. Normally, I don't see images in my dreams. Something else of note: I'm really good at discerning matching rotated 3D diagrams, like the ones on IQ tests. I just know which one(s) match, even though there's nothing but black "in my mind's eye".

Yeah, it's can all be pretty confusing, especially when you can think clearly about what something looks like, even without visualizing it. Visualizing means having some kind of mental experience that is like seeing something out in the world, even though for many visualizers that might not be as clear as actually seeing something. From your description of what you see when you try to visualize an apple, you may be aphantasic or a relatively weak visualizer, but it's not necessarily so easy to be sure. As for where a visualization might appear? Logically, if it was like actual vision, it would appear in front of you, and some visualizers do "see" imagined things in front of them. But for others, it's kind of "somewhere else," maybe like another display screen that exists somewhere inside your mind, or maybe even mentally located somewhere inside your head, whether at the front or the back. Visualization is an internal experience, so it's hard to compare what different people experience. And just to throw another confusing factor into the mix, some people visualize better with their eyes open than with their eyes closed. I consider myself to be aphantasic in several sensory modes. I know very well what things look like, but the occasional flashes of something that might be like a visualization are so brief and so blurry that I can't even say for sure that they are visual in nature. Anyway, they aren't very useful and I've learned not to try and focus them since that just puts all thought out of my head as I mentally chase what I cannot really see. But if I don't worry about what my mind is doing, it seems to me that I have a much more detailed understanding of remembered or imagined visual information if I keep my eyes open.