How Hubs Will Transform Apple Notes Forever

Apple Notes hubs are positioned as a practical alternative to folder-heavy organization: instead of scattering topic notes across a maze of categories, hubs create a single “bird’s-eye view” page that links out to everything relevant and keeps the overview intact. The core problem driving the system is that topic notes—like those gathered from an exhibition—get mixed into a larger pile of unrelated material (recipes, resources, project notes). Tags can help, but they often produce long, scrollable lists that don’t reveal the bigger picture. A hub solves that by acting like a personal Wikipedia entry for a subject: one visually distinct note accessible from the home node, containing summaries plus links to related notes and external references.

The transcript illustrates the approach with a contemporary art example. After visiting an exhibition in Vienna featuring Avian Worm, the user imagines building a knowledge base around “contemporary art.” Rather than letting those notes blend into the general workspace, the hub becomes the central landing point. It includes information about what makes an artist contemporary and links to notes about other artists, movements, and themes. Crucially, notes linked inside the hub can keep their original tags—linking doesn’t force a tag overhaul—so the system preserves flexibility while still providing a coherent overview.

Hubs are presented as broadly applicable across life areas, not just learning topics. The same structure can support writing articles, collecting tips, saving quotes, and developing story ideas through a creative writing hub. It can also organize technical work, such as a web development hub that holds code snippets, project notes, and tutorials. Health is another example: a health hub can track workouts, lab results, and notes for doctor visits, consolidating the information that matters most into one navigable command center.

A “fully functional” hub setup is described as straightforward inside Apple Notes. The process starts by creating a new node on the home node using double greater-than signs (>>), naming it (e.g., “Contemporary Art”), and returning it to the home node so it’s easy to reach from the main page. Inside the hub, headings organize content into sections like overview, categories, and artists. Under each subtopic, related notes are linked—such as linking artist notes for Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor—and those individual artist notes can include backlinks back to the hub. This two-way linking makes it easy to jump between the overview and the supporting details.

The system’s payoff is framed as a shift from passive note-taking to active knowledge building. Hubs are described as evolving with the user: as new information is added, connections emerge and the hub’s structure naturally expands, helping users see the whole picture each time they open it. Instead of searching for scattered fragments, the hub becomes the command center where relationships between ideas are surfaced and understanding deepens over time.