25/08/2026
I learnt one of my favourite things at Mind Valley University from someone who wasn’t on stage.
I was sitting in a session, taking notes on my Mac, when I noticed the woman near me doing something slightly differently.
She was typing too.
But while she was typing, her Mac was also recording the speaker and transcribing everything into the same note.
I thought, oh… that’s clever.
Then a slide came up.
She picked up her iPhone, took a photo of it and put her phone back down.
A second later, the photo appeared inside the note on her Mac.
OK. Now she had my attention.
I leaned over and asked what she was using.
I was expecting some clever conference app I’d never heard of.
“Apple Notes.”
That was it. Apple Notes.
The app that has been sitting on my phone and Mac for years while I’ve apparently been using about 7% of it.
😂
It turns out you can record a talk directly inside a note on your Mac, have Notes transcribe it, and still type your own thoughts at the same time.
Then, whenever there’s a slide you want:
File → Insert from iPhone or iPad → Take Photo
Your iPhone camera opens.
Take the photo, tap Use Photo, and it drops straight into the note you’re already working in.
So instead of leaving a conference with:
notes in one place,
a recording somewhere else,
a folder of downloads,
and 47 photos of slides in your camera roll that mean absolutely nothing two weeks later…
you leave with one note.
Your thoughts.
The transcript.
The recording.
The slides you actually cared about.
Links.
Things you want to follow up.
All together.
And weirdly, that was what stayed with me.
Not because it’s groundbreaking technology. It isn’t.
It was because I already owned all of it.
There’s something slightly ridiculous about how quickly we’ll download another app, subscribe to another piece of software, or now ask AI to solve a problem… before finding out what the tools sitting right in front of us can already do.
So now I want to know what else I’ve missed.
If you use Apple products, what feature did you discover embarrassingly late?
Because apparently I need lessons. 😆