If a black hole had the mass of an apple, would touching it kill you?

The gravitational half of your intuition is exactly right and the answer is dominated by something else entirely.

Gravity. At any distance, a black hole with the mass of an apple pulls like an apple. It does not suck things in from across the room; gravity depends on mass and distance, and neither has changed. Its event horizon would be unimaginably small — far smaller than an atomic nucleus.

So if it passed through your hand, it would almost certainly miss every nucleus and interact with essentially nothing. It would pass through, and through the table, and continue into the Earth. It would not eat you, and it would not eat the planet in any reasonable time, because its cross-section is absurdly tiny and matter is mostly empty space.

That is the calm answer. The other one is that a black hole that small would not be sitting on your table for long enough to touch.

That is the part that dominates: very small black holes are predicted to evaporate, and the smaller they are, the faster and more violently.

The theoretical result is that a black hole radiates, and its temperature is inversely related to its mass. A stellar black hole is colder than empty space and grows rather than shrinks. A black hole with the mass of an apple would be extraordinarily hot and would radiate its entire mass away in a very short time.

And the mass of an apple, converted entirely to energy, is an enormous amount of energy. Released rapidly, in your kitchen, it would not be a local event — the calculation puts it well beyond anything survivable for the surrounding area.

So the answer to "would touching it kill you" is that the question does not arise, because you would not have time to reach out.

On the tidal force question specifically, since that was the interesting part of your reasoning: yes, right at the horizon the tidal forces would be immense, and no, it does not matter.

Tidal force falls off very steeply with distance. For an object with a horizon smaller than a nucleus, the region where those forces are significant is correspondingly tiny. A finger approaching it experiences apple-strength gravity right up until it is within a distance far smaller than the atoms it is made of.

That is the general lesson about small black holes: everything dramatic about them is confined to a region so small that ordinary matter never gets there. Bigger black holes are dangerous at a distance precisely because their horizons are large enough for a person to be inside the extreme region.

Worth adding that this whole scenario is hypothetical in a strong sense: nobody knows of a process that would produce a black hole that small.

Stellar collapse produces objects many times the mass of the sun. Very small ones would have to be primordial, formed in the early universe, and any with masses in the range you describe would have evaporated long ago.

Which is a nice illustration of how the physics closes the loop — the reason we do not have apple-mass black holes lying around is the same reason one would not stay on your table.