When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian.
But then maybe I'm missing the point of Obsidian?
But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying. With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.
You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"
Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)
This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?
TIA for any suggestions!
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV
Once you actually understand how sync works in details it does wonders.
Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.
That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.