What happened to the apple while Jonas was playing with it? What do you think it means?

Then it was in his hand, and he looked at it carefully, but it was the same apple. Unchanged. The same size and shape: a perfect sphere. The same nondescript shade, about the same shade as his own tunic. (Chapter 3)

In this passage, Jonas observes the apple after it first appears to change in a brief and inexplicable manner during a game of catch with his friend Asher. The subsequent description of the apple emphasizes the theme of Sameness that becomes both more prevalent and more specific in later sections of the novel. The apple is perfect and unchanging, much as Jonas's society is static and apparently ideal. Its shape does not allow for imperfections and the irregularities of individual apples, an ethic that is evident in the structure of the community and in the values taught to the community's children. Finally, Jonas describes the apple's shade as nondescript, throwing an apparently innocent description of the apple's perfection into doubt with an incongruous detail. We know immediately that apples usually manifest in vibrant colors and could never be described as "nondescript." This aspect of the description foreshadows Jonas's ability to see color while indicating that something is missing in the apple's perfection, much as Jonas later discovers a damaging lack of color in his society's apparent flawlessness.