Apple Notes gained a variety of great features in iOS 18 last fall, like collapsible sections, color highlighting, audio recording with transcripts, and more. But I recently discovered one more change that answers one of my long-time feature requests, and could satisfy a lot of power users.
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The second wave of Apple Intelligence features is imminent, and it’s a huge upgrade—including for Apple Notes users. iOS 18 already packed a strong Notes update, but iOS 18.2 adds to that three key AI improvements for Notes users. Here’s what’s new.
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Earlier this month we reported on a scary bug impacting Apple Notes users and offered a simple fix. Now, Apple has officially acknowledged the issue and outlined the solution for users in its own support document.
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iOS 18 is a big release for the iPhone apps, with the brand new Passwords app plus significant enhancements to apps like Messages, Photos, and Journal. One of my most-used apps, Notes, gets a variety of powerful new features in iOS 18 including live audio transcription, highlights, Smart Script, and more. Here’s everything new in Apple Notes.
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Apple’s Notes and Voice Memos apps gain the handy feature of live audio transcription in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. Join along for a look at how to use audio transcription in iOS 18 including search, export, and more.
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I recently had to Google how to get color text in the Apple Notes app, because the way to do this in iOS 17 is rather deeply hidden!
Especially if you want to do it in the iPhone or iPad app, you have to use one of three workarounds, because – strangely – the feature isn’t directly supported …
Update: Color text highlighting is now supported in iOS 18 beta 1, with some limitations. See the end of the piece for details.
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If you’ve ever tried to create nested folders in Apple Notes, you might have concluded that it’s not possible. Update: One method which failed before on iPhone now work – more below.
It’s easiest on a Mac – but even then it’s not exactly an intuitive process, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one who didn’t know how to do it …
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After an earlier test, all Evernote free users now have their accounts limited to a single notebook containing just 50 notes.
While the company claims that most free users won’t be affected, that is almost certainly counting anyone who briefly trialled it before abandoning it. Almost no active users will fall within the new limits, effectively ending the free tier. The change will likely drive many to switch to Apple’s Notes …
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Among all the new features in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, Apple has introduced some great changes to its Notes app. However, if you have already installed the latest versions of the operating systems on your devices, be aware that some of the notes will not show up on earlier versions of iOS or macOS.
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Update: iOS 9.3 adds support for importing Evernote data into Notes by long-pressing on Evernote Export files.
Apple dramatically improved its Notes app with iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan last fall thanks to enhanced photo support, new formatting tools, URL snippets, a share extension, and an iCloud Drive backend to keep it all in sync. So much so that people have actually been moving from Evernote to Apple Notes and not looking back, but there hasn’t been a simple way to make the leap until now. Included in the OS X 10.11.4 software update is a new option in the Notes app that makes migrating content from Evernote to Apple Notes a very simple process. Here’s what you’ll need to get started:
