The productivity app industry has become exceptionally good at selling aspiration.
You are no longer just buying a notes app. You are apparently building a “second brain”. You are constructing a “creator operating system”. You are “unlocking deep work”.
For years, Silicon Valley has treated organisation as a software problem requiring increasingly complex solutions. One app for notes. Another for tasks. Another for calendars. Another connecting the first three together because none of them cooperate properly on their own. Naturally, all of them now want monthly subscriptions.
The result is that people thinking about starting a YouTube channel, blog, podcast or newsletter often assume they need an entire productivity stack before they can begin. Some creator workflows now look less like writing systems and more like air traffic control.
Instead of building elaborate dashboards in Notion or carefully interconnected knowledge vaults in Obsidian, many creators are using a handful of simpler apps already sitting on their Apple devices.
Apple Notes has become surprisingly capable over the years. It syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac. It handles folders, tags, embedded links, attachments and collaborative notes. More importantly, it opens immediately, which turns out to matter quite a lot when your business model currently consists of “remembering ideas before they evaporate”.
A lot of productivity software introduces friction in the name of flexibility. You can customise everything, reorganise everything and tag everything until eventually maintaining the system becomes its own unpaid internship.
Most creators do not need that level of infrastructure. They need somewhere to dump ideas, draft scripts and keep track of deadlines without accidentally turning organisation into a part-time job.
The same thing is happening with writing apps.
Some users pair Apple Notes with iA Writer, which has survived years of productivity trends largely because it refuses to behave like a productivity platform. It is a minimalist writing app with plain text support, iCloud syncing and a one-time purchase price instead of another recurring subscription quietly feeding off your bank account every month.
READ MORE: 7 Underused Apple Notes Features Worth Knowing
The subscription creep across software has become absurd. Streaming services want monthly fees. Photo editing apps want monthly fees. Your meditation app wants monthly fees. Somewhere, probably, a calculator app is preparing a pitch deck.
Productivity software joined that economy enthusiastically.
The irony is that Apple’s built-in apps have improved enough that they now cover a surprising amount of what people were paying third-party services to do a few years ago.
Apple Reminders supports subtasks, recurring reminders and shared lists. It also integrates directly with Apple Calendar, so scheduled reminders appear automatically alongside meetings and appointments.
Ideas go into Notes. Tasks into Reminders. Deadlines into Calendar. Writing into iA Writer. Done.
No templates. No “creator dashboard”. No YouTube tutorial titled “How I Built My Ultimate Second Brain System In 2026”.
There are certainly people who benefit from more advanced tools. Large research projects, collaborative teams and extensive archives can justify software like Notion or Obsidian.
But most people starting creative projects online are nowhere near that scale yet.
READ MORE: We’re Paying More For Features We Already Had
