Hi I came across a sentence in my studies:
あれらのリンゴは大きい。
It was translated as:
Those apples are big.
I was under the understanding that あれ was a standalone pronoun and あの was the modifying one. Is this just a case where the sentence is intended to emphasize its THOSE apples specifically that are big?
The difference is the presence of ～ら, the pluralising suffix.
Can’t say I’ve regularly encountered it with あれ, though.
If you want to specify plural objects that are far away from you and the listener (or in other situations, which I’ll get to later), you have two options.
You can pluralize the pronoun that stands in for them and expresses their location, as we see with あれ becoming あれら. You then need to connect あれら to the noun with something, so that’s what の does.
Or, you can pluralize the object and go with the pre-noun adjectival あの.
Unfortunately, in the case of リンゴ, there is not a good pluralizing suffix that works naturally with it. Options such as リンゴたち and リンゴら do not sound natural to natives. ～たち is typically only used with people and animals. ～ら can be used with inanimate objects, but natives would likely find リンゴら strange. It might sound poetic if you needed to use it in a poem.
So as a result, pluralizing a pronoun and attaching that is the best option. You aren’t limited to あれ, you could use これ or それ as well, which basically has you covered for any pluralizing you might want to do.
Here’s a blog post called りんごの複数形 (The plural form of りんご), in which the author states that they are unaware of an appropriate one.
You just answered a question I had in my head for a while about pluralization.
Thank you. 
Wow. Thank you Leebo.
Thanks Leebo!
Learned something new today! Thanks for the question 
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