Switching to Apple Notes

Hope you don’t mind I disagree with you. Look, Apple has to make those apps better. Because they are included in the high price you pay for their devices. You say they are free and hence don’t need much functionality. My view is that they are not free. When you buy an Apple product you pay for the hardware AND for the software which comes with it.

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Would be interesting to find market research on how many people explicitly buy MacBooks in order to get the bundled copy of Apple Notes.

Not really. There’s a whole App Store with free-and-up notes apps to choose from. The ‘high price’ goes for hardware and ecosystem and, yes, apps, but a Notes app isn’t a linchpin or a deciding factor. The fact that Apple had an absolute crap Notes app with a garbage font for years shows that improving it beoynd the pretty good app it is already is not a necessity.

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Evidence?

Oh, and ew! Skeuomorphism.

I don’t think extraordinary evidence is required to suggest that a free notes app isn’t a deciding factor or linchpin in deciding on a computing platform. :peace_symbol:

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Hey all -

Has any one reached the limits of Apple notes? I have 12,000 notes in Evernote and while I don’t plan to import everything, I will be importing a lot of them. Has anyone used more than 5,00+ notes in Apple Notes? Any issues?

Any folks who have gone from being active Evernote users to Apple Note users here who have any other tips to help with the transition?

I’m going to ditch Evernote as my filing cabinet for Apple Notes, and have moved my thinking, writing, research to Roam.

Considering I can integrate it with Shortcuts and AppleScript to turn it into a pseudo-OmniFocus for free, I really can’t understand why you think the app is terrible.

While these are valid complaints, I have two things to say:

  1. Perhaps I never need to resize columns.
  2. That’s what the undo button is for.

Well… Apple’s built in apps are [price of product]. Other apps are [price of apple product + $$$]. Yes, there are other free apps. But none are as good as Apple Notes for what I use it for.

Apple has not made public any limits for Notes. I use EagleFiler for longer-term storage on my Mac but I’ve got close to 800 notes in Apple Notes with no slowdowns, and I know people with 2000-3000 notes, also with no issues.

Try copying out a section of your Evernote notes (without removing them) for Apple Notes import and see how it goes.

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Thank you. Great suggestion.

My advice is not to use Apple Notes for long-term storage of a lot of files. While that can be done, that is not the primary purpose of Apple Notes. In the long run I believe you will have a better experience with Apple Notes (or most other note taking apps for that matter) by using Apple Notes for taking notes and then linking needed documents to it. I routinely add a link to DevonThink or Google Drive document in my notes. This makes the process fast and I believe reduces the probably of syncing and stability issues long-term.

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It’s not an ideal app for long-term storage for some people with certain needs, true, but I wouldn’t agree with the idea that long-term storage of notes is not a ‘primary purpose’. By all indications it is. Apple never announced a size limit on files, and I haven’t known anyone since the revamp a couple of years ago who’s hit a limit in use, and the growing numbers of people who have, for instance, migrated to it from Evernote suggest that it’s a very robust app. Apple engineered a suprisingly robust revamp in 2015, and it continues to be a very solid, useful app.

Just have enough iCloud storage!

If you want sophisticated search, or use of tags, or more flexible import/export, or font/color themes, or sophisticated import or pdf editing - there are other better costly options. But for most people tossing a few hundred or a few thousand files in Notes works well short- or long-term.

Apple Notes isn’t my primary notetaking app, and it isn’t my primary note storage app either, but I still have 800+ notes in it and has been extremely reliable since the revamp.

Perhaps what makes me nervous is that I had a terrible problem with Apple Notes with iOS 13. Fortunately, I had robust backup or I would have lost a lot of notes.