It is very important to extract effective wavelengths for quantitative analysis of fruit internal quality based on hyperspectral imaging. In the present study, genetic algorithm (GA), successive projections algorithm (SPA) and GA-SPA combining algorithm were used for extracting effective wavelengths from 400-1 000 nm hyperspectral images of Yantai "Fuji" apples, respectively. Based on the effective wavelengths selected by GA, SPA and GA-SPA, different models were built and compared for predicting soluble solids content (SSC) of apple using partial least squares (PLS), least squared support vector machine (LS-SVM) and multiple linear regression (MLR), respectively. A total of 160 samples were prepared for the calibration (n = 120) and prediction (n = 40) sets. Among all the models, the SPA-MLR achieved the best results, where Rp(2), RMSEP and RPD were 0.950 1, 0.308 7 and 4.476 6 respectively. Results showed that SPA can be effectively used for selecting the effective wavelengths from hyperspectral data. And, SPA-MLR is an optimal modeling method for prediction of apple SSC. Furthermore, less effective wavelengths and simple and easily-interpreted MLR model show that the SPA-MLR model has a great potential for online detection of apple SSC and development of a portable instrument.