I'm going to go out on a limb and say it that if you have an iPhone iPad or mac Apple notes is the best notet taking app for you I've tried basically everything under the sun it looks kind of a lot like this and I always end up coming back to Apple notes now there are three primary reasons why Apple notes is the best note taking app for me and is probably the best note taking app for you and those three reasons are one it is fast and easy to use two it has incredible organization and privacy features and three it gives you the ability to scan and mark up documents so let's get into why Apple notes is king So the first reason that I love using Apple notes is that it is fast and you can make it even faster with just a couple settings changes on your phone if I go here into settings and I click on control center we can scroll down and add quicknotes so now that that is there let's say that I need to add a quick note but I'm actually on a specific website here so I'm reading about a couple different coffee drinks if I swipe here to open up Control Center and I click on quick note but you'll see that it even has a little button here to click add link it's now linked to the specific page that I'm on and I can quickly add a note and say this is the best coffee I've ever had and I can save it and that will automatically be put into my quicknotes and I can go and organize that at a later time if you've got an iPad with an apple pencil you can start a note immediately from the lock screen all you have to do is just use the pencil and start writing on the black screen and it'll turn on and save that note automatically pretty cool and the best part about Apple notes is that it syns across all of your devices using iCloud and it is really really fast if I have two devices open side by side and I start a note within 10 seconds or so you'll see that that note on one device has already Auto populate on to the next there's not any other tool in the market that does that that quickly the second reason why I think Apple notes is incredibly powerful for most users is there's a lot of organizational and privacy tools that are automatically built in so if you really enjoy building folders and nesting them to structure all of your notes this is going to be perfect for you it's really as simple as just clicking add we'll title this sample and clicking done so you'll see that that default AED just to be a note right here but you can easily take this folder here and you can Nest it under a folder or within a folder and you can do this to your heart's content it's really simple to then take a note here if we just click and hold on it we can move it by clicking here and we can add it into our sample folder and we are good to go so let's say you've got all of your folder system built out you might want to start using hashtags it's another quick and easy way to filter down all of your notes and make them easily searchable so here I'm back on this note and I am just going to add # research cuz I want to categorize all those even if they're in different folders here so now what I'll do is I'm going to go and create a folder here but I'm going to create a smart folder so here we're going to call this research and I'm going to click make smart folder we're going to click on tags and you've got a handful of filters you can use here I'm not going to dive into each one but there's some really powerful stuff you can do in here we're going to click any selected tag we're going to make sure that research is selected now when we click done it's going to give us this little gear icon here so now if I click into this research you can see I've now got all of my notes that have the hashtag research regardless of what folder they are in they will all appear here and this is really cool and a really powerful way to filter through if you've got hundreds or dozens of notes if if you've got some personal or private information inside of Apple notes that you want to make sure you keep safe you can actually password protect it I'm going to swipe over here into settings if you click on to notes and password here you can actually see there are three different ways you can protect them using your device passcode you can use a custom password you can use Touch ID or face ID depending on your device so when you go back over to your note if you want to protect it you you just click on the three dot menu you'll click the lock button and it'll ask for you to verify which of those three you want to use and you are good to go now one of my favorite things about Apple notes is being able to share notes and folders with family members to collaborate or share information me and my wife have an entire shared folder here where within that we keep things like to-do lists grocery lists house projects it's just a quick and simple way to share information back forth to do this you'll just go ahead and grab your folder and you click on the three dot menu and you will click share folder you then got a handful of ways you can actually Kickstart that process either through messages once you've got it set up you'll actually see that this folder now has a little share icon and it says shared with a specific person and you can always go in and edit and tweak that so if I click on this three dot menu again and I click manage the shared folder you can make sure that you give it to people access or remove their access if needed something new in Apple notes is the ability to add links from one note into another now this works really well for my reading list here you can see I've got this list of all my notes of all the books I've read within the last year but each one of these is actually a hyperlink into a separate note so you'll see right here here is a note on a book that I'm currently reading and here is kind of my pinned notes so all I have to do is go ahead and tap and highlight this whole section here and I'm going to click add link now what we can do is link to a specific URL or we can link to a page so if I just type the name of the page here you can actually see that it pops up right there and you can use the note as a title you can change the name or you can click done right there but now that that hyperlink is built when I click on this it automatically opens up that note it's a great way to create a table of contents within a folder if you've got a lot of notes if you want to scan in a document into Apple notes and then Mark it up it's actually relatively simple let's go ahead and create a new note I'm going to click on the camera app and click scan documents here I'll go ahead and lift this up raise it I want to try and take another one get a slightly better one here there we go I like the second one so what I'm going to do is go and delete my first option here and we're going to crop this just make sure that I do the edges just right here okay with the magic power of editing we're going to pretend like that only took me 2 seconds you can also see here you can change the color if this was a color PDF or if you want to keep it in Gray scale or black and white there's options there and then you can rotate it if needed but from there you are done so now you've got your saved pdf here you'll even see here it Auto generates a name for the file based upon the PDF you can see quick guide over here on the left and you can mark this up so if we go ahead and click on this and quick quick look here just grab my apple pencil and I want to make sure that I remember that I need to highlight this and I need to remember the different cycle types and we are done just like that it's a great way to say PDFs for things that you might need for work or for your personal life or for your home it's just a really quick and easy way to do that so that's the three reasons why I'm using Apple notes rather than anything else again it kind of feels a little bit like this where there's a million options out there but I always just come back to the Simplicity of Apple notes so if this video convinced you to start using Apple notes or switch from something else I'd love to know in the comments what feature is driving you towards that so with that I will see you in the next one thanks for watching